Crappy Album Covers #324 — The Horror, the horror …

Some covers are ugly for a reason. This one’s ugly because it’s a bootleg of a live concert in Philadelphia by the Danish heavy metallers Mercyful Fate. Bootlegs normally have substandard covers done by someone who did not understand the fine line between scary and ugly. You can listen to this bootleg for free here. The sound isn’t that bad.
This LP (year unknown) is a sound effects album by the BBC. The cover is probably intended to be a summary of the contents therein.

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Crappy Album Covers #46 — Fugly people

album-cover-crap-1_lurch_lp-cover-loverOK. I’m being unfair. Lurch was already ugly. We expect him to be ugly, and he plays the part. We watched the Addams Family series when we were kids because of all the ugly characters, and all of the strange ways that were totally unlike a normal family.

Ted Cassidy played a Frankenstein-like character called Lurch in the series the Addams Family, back in the days when color television was just starting. But we were lucky in our family. We still had a black-and-white TV, which is really the only proper way to watch the Addams Family.

In black-and-white, Morticia had cigarette-white skin and looked like death warmed over, for example. Color invites the danger of adding flesh tones, which ruins the “undead” effect, which I think lies at the heart of the whole Addams Family atmosphere they were trying to get across.

A Morticia that is more lifelike? A Fester that doesn’t look like he was carved out of soapstone? A Lurch that is not gray-faced, and that doesn’t look like he forgot to take his meds? What’s the point?

album-cover-crap-23_lp-cover-lover

It’s perfectly OK to love your mother, I suppose. Heino has taken this to its ultimate futility, it seems, with this offering, called “Liebe Mutter”, or “Dear Mother”, as I believe it is translated.

Heino has, like many albums I have here, have been a staple of crappy album cover blogs. But this time, rather than have widespread photoshopping of Heino or the rest of the album (which may well have really happened), a website called “faceinhole.com” has a concept where they provide a photo with the face already covered in “transparent” pixels so that you can plop any face you like  in place of folks like Heino.

So, my choice of face was that of George W. Bush. He has had his issues, but they may not have been principally maternal in nature. But what the hell…

gbush_liebemutter
Create your own FACEinHOLE

Yeah, I admit it’s a hack job. But that is kind of like Bush’s presidency.

The glasses weren’t pixeled out, so I had some time trying to fit Bush’s eyes inside the glasses.

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album-cover-crap-7_lp-cover-lover1Fred Emney (1900-1980) just wants you to buy his record then f**k off.

He was a British comedian, playing a gruff, fat bloke wearing a monacle, just as he is depicted here for his fans. As part of his act, he often played his own piano compositions.

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album-cover-crap-24_lp-cover-loverSome people you would rather see fully clothed.  Liz Lyons is a comedian, whom I would guess was into a bawdier kind of humour than normal. For 1975.

LPcoverlover.com reports that this 1975 album had reviews on the back cover which said things like: “When this kitten lays one on you, you know you’ve been laid…on” and “I laughed so hard I fell off my wife and broke my arm.”

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album-cover-crap-22_lp-cover-loverThis single by The Hendersons has been traced back to 1981.

Now, photoshop wasn’t created until the early 1990s. So, this cover came about due to good old-fashioned photo retouching of the kind that framed Oswald in the Kennedy assassination.

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