Tag: album covers

Crappy Album Covers #328 — Setting high expectations then fighting them …

Here are the Brady Bunch’s Marcia and Peter Brady (for real). Chris Knight and Maureen McCormick got together to make an album some time after the series ended.Maureen did a string of B-movies along with several cameo appearances on television, and was going through a rough time in her career for a couple of decades, but is still acting, and has also written an autobiography about “surviving” having to play Marcia Brady, who had, as a result of the sitcom, become a role model for the perfect all-American daughter.
Cindy Brady is actually on the cover, but the lighting, subject and camera angle were so bad that she changed her name to LenaZavaroni. Actually, Lena is for real (1963-1999), and here she is at age 10 for her 1974 album, “Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me”. She lived for most of her life in Scotland, where she had a strong fan base. She had also performed with Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball while in Hollywood. At age 35 she succumbed to anorexia, a disease she had been fighting against since age 13.

 

Crappy Album Covers #327 — Already knowing your cover is crappy

I don’t know about you, but this album, by El Tadeo, is being sold by everybody from Napster to Amazon to websites as far-removed as Japan. The reason I am sure it sells so well, is because this is a comedy album with explicit content, which is dull if all you know is English. As you would guess, this album is in Spanish.I guess El Tad expects us all to plop it on our turntable and just let it happen. But I know what’s going on. El Tad is channelling the late John Lennon, who oft times wore a toilet seat around his neck in some of his early concerts. Soon, El Tad will be thinking he is more popular than Jesus. Let’s just pray he doesn’t let this toilet seat thing go to his head … doh! Too late!

The LP was reissued as a CD in 2009. I couldn’t find the year of the original pressing.
Putting cutie monsters in a child-style drawing on the cover does not excuse Alphabutt from the overall grossness in concept. Year unkown. Berkeley, California native Kimya Dawson appears to be somewhat of an activist and has at least 6 albums out.

 

Crappy Album Covers #326 — That’s a switch

80s new-wave reggae/dance superstars The Police released this 1978 single, about suicide, called “Can’t Stand Losing You” (from their debut album Outlandos D’Amour) and featured the well-known lineup of Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland, who all formed respectable music careers in their own right.As you would have guessed, the cover created some controversy, and was banned in some countries in favour of an alternative cover. Probably not their usual party fare …
But, Iggy Pop is usually more likely than The Police to go all psychotic in his performances. But here he is, as light as bubblegum, with his third and last album on the Arista label, called “Party”, released in 1981. Arista wanted him to record one “commercial” album, and they sure got it.Does Iggy Pop need any introduction to you? Would you believe me if I told you that all he did was produce party albums? “No” to both questions? Doesn’t surprise me.

 

Crappy Album Covers #325 — Christmas Messages you probably don’t want to hear

One knows that Yoko must have been going though a creative slump back in 1991 when Ryko released this EP. It’s hard to fathom who would spend their Christmas putting this one in their CD player.
… Unless, of course, this 2006 Billy Idol album was their only alternative. He should have released this under his birth name, William Broad. Unless he can make “White Christmas” sound like “White Wedding”, it’s probably not going to work out. The track list includes mostly traditional Christmas songs.

 

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.

Crappy Album Covers #322 — Pretentious Prog

On a faraway planet, children crawl out of their homes inside of outdoor toilets to greet the Sun God. They call their place the “Houses of the Holey.” 

Led Zeppelin’s 1973 classic “Houses of the Holy” yielded a minor single, D’yer Maker, but it did end up as one of the top 200 albums of all time, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and also won a Grammy in 1974.
The Korean version of this album is a lot crappier where the robot (or whatever it is) is fishing the band members out of a rusty trash barrel (or a busted rooftop, it’s hard to tell). 

This is the album containing the 1977 monster hit “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions”.

 

Crappy Album Covers #321 — From sketchy to artless

Barr is a Swedish group, which released this album with a rather austere and bleak album cover. But the YouTube video below shows that you can’t judge a record by its cover. Barr has had an undeservedly small following, and are relatively unknown internationally. In fact, it gets me into one of my rants where I preach about the fact that popular (top 40) music has only gone to the dogs only because singles are never released of any good music done by musicians with any real skill these days. Just don’t get me started. I can go on all day about it.

“Skogsbo is the place” is a classical/folk album released in 2008 by Barr.
Mystery was a band covered in the last post. Given the choice between adolescent art and a Bryce rendering of geometric and humanoid shapes, it is difficult to wonder which is worse.

This is from their 1992 self-titled debut album.

Here is Barr, doing a track from “Skogsbo is the place”, called Moonfall

Crappy Album Covers #320 — Painfully Unoriginal

Danish prog rockers Royal Hunt released their sixth album in 2001, called “The Mission”, a nod to Ray Bradbury. 

There isn’t really much to the Bryce rendering, just a knock-off to say that this album is “interesting”, and you’re supposed to listen to it an think about it a lot. It is highly likely that it is a near copy of the album cover below, from an album released a year earlier by Canadian prog rock group “Mystery”.

Royal Hunt’s most recent album is “X”, released earlier this year.
Canadian prog rockers “Mystery” had this design for their 2000 LP, “At The Dawn of a New Millenium”. While I don’t think anyone cares about stealing the jacket design, I am sure it ruffled a few feathers in the Quebec-based group. 

They have borne comparisons to Yes and Journey, and it had been recommended by many in the CAC Blogosphere that if you wanted to get to know their music, this album is actually a great place to start. “Dawn” is actually a compilation of their three albums prior to this one. So, while it doesn’t exactly qualify as a “best of” album, it makes a decent sampler.

As for a comparison to Yes, one of their lead singers, Benoit David, has been touring with Yes as a replacement for Jon Anderson since 2008. He is now an official member of the group. That said, he still had time to release another album with Mystery earlier this year, called “One Among The Living”.

 

Crappy Album Covers #317 — How Ordinary People Cope with Body Image

Retro prog rockers Flamborough Head, with their 2005 album, Tales of Imperfection, appear to make an album theme about female body image, although I am not clear if they could carry this for all 7 tracks on this CD and get away with it. 

Since Flamborough Head is also the name of a county on the east coast of England, I thought this was a British group. But according to their website, this group is Dutch.
Jamaican Winston Foster, known to his adoring admirers as Yellowman for his albino appearance, has this album which seemed to have upstaged rap and hip-hop stylings by a couple of years at least, with this 1985 album, entitled “Walking Jewlery Store”. 

And Hip-Hop and Rap artists have been copping his style since. Sound bites from his songs can be found on albums by NWA, The Notorious B. I. G., Tupac Shakur, and Mos Def, to name a few.

He has released albums as late as 2007.

[Audio] Crappy Album Covers #316 — More Commercial Tie-ins

An example of Commercial Tie-Ins: This is possibly a record given to Michelin Tire salesmen in order to give the salesmen something to say to their customers by way of promoting the tires. Here is a track from their promotional material, from about 1960, though it may not have come from this particular album. Kudos to Bunk Strutts at Tacky Raccoons for bringing this to my attention.
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This is from one of my old posts. I post it again because I have found a soundtrack from such albums courtesy of April Winchell.

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Crappy Album Covers #314 — Bruno’s Younger Half-Brother

Bruno’s younger half-brother Tomas wanted to get into show business too. But unlike Bruno, he went to Spain where he thought there may be more of a market for playing accordion while taking your clothes off.At a certain point, when he has taken all of his clothes off, he plays his accordion down at the groin level …. verrrrrry delicately…..
Tomas’s father Andre, mother Bertille, and big brother Laszlo has decided to put out a French-language album, to show off their linguistic diversity. Bertille can’t do much except stare at the floor since she sprained her wrist playing maracas a little over-zealously last week. Laszlo wishes he were in a heavy metal group, but his father made him take accordion lessons instead. This “family band” thing is cramping Laszlo’s style.Don’t know much at all about these records.

 

[Adult Content] Crappy Album Covers #313 — More people that worry me

The kind of only definition of romantic that this album conjures up is reminiscent of cheap 70s porn, with the requisite bad acting and bad writing. Since this is an instrumental album, it could very well be the same musicians that performed on the movie. Martin Denny is a well known pianist who should know better. He is known as the “father of exotica” music. Definitely not the father of erotica, with this LP.
Surely this is some kind of joke. If it indeed is a joke and not a real record cover, it has  to be the best retouching job in the history of photography. But alas, it is the real thing. This is a various artists collection of racy music and comedy. Even by today’s standards, the album cover and title give me the creeps. I just hope she returns her pussy back to her daddy once she’s done playing with it. I mean the cat.

Crappy Album Covers #311 — Dogs and Cats

Watchtower fans (both of them, I guess) might get annoyed about my honest question, along the lines of: does the title of their 1989 album, “Control and Resistance” refer to the dog or the Rush-influenced lyrics?progarchives.com lists copies of this CD from $15.00 to $40.00, depending on the condition.
zoice.com had this album, no idea what it’s about. But in case you couldn’t figure out the theme of the album, and don’t understand the language and alphabet used, I guess it’s about cats. There is a female cat, a mad cat, and a sleepy cat.  The cat woman depicted in the photo doesn’t look too expressive, but if she’s holding a pistol, I guess she doesn’t need to be.

Crappy Album Covers #310 — Sin and Debauchery

Porter Wagoner was at it again with even more whiskey-soaked country tunes, the saddest being the one about the time that he drank from a bottle until there was no whiskey left. It wasn’t the part about the hallucinations that was sad, it was the part about drinking and suddenly there was nothing left to drink. Imagine, being told to stop drinking by a mere bottle!Porter is now gonna show that bottle who’s the boss….
When you run out of whiskey, there is only one thing left for a drunkard to do, and that is to go to Sin Alley. They got sex, lust, fighting, and did I mention sex? And even frogs and Martians! Whatever you’re into, I suppose…

Crappy Album Covers #309 — Getting carried away with graphics

Accused on progulus.com of  being one of many ugly Bryce renderings (or possibly Corel Draw), the cover looks too generic for an artist to base a “public image” on. 

It is not clear if “anomaly” is the name of the band, the album, or both. Searches turned up tons of albums named “anomaly”, none matching this cover.
Power of Omens is a currently active band, who currently has a spam-riddled Myspace site, whose most recent notable post seems to be over the death of one of the brothers of the band members, also a musician. 

Their own website also has as its sole page, a large photo of the late Matt Williamson, and links to blog posts, along with a link back to Myspace.

No news about their discography, or of this Bryce-induced casualty, entitled “Eyes of the Oracle”.

Crappy Album Covers #308 — Sexually Preoccupied

This is another compilation from that seminal CAC factory, TOPS, where we have had so many of our album covers come from. This 1959 album features the vocal stylings of Cesar Romero and Mel Torme, among several other artists. 

TOPS records sold mostly cheap cover versions of their records in drug stores, department stores, and advertised on radio in some markets in the 1950s and early 1960s.
This is the second album from Ilene (“Rusty”) Warren, “Knockers Up”. This 1960 album title is what gave her the monacre of “The Knockers Up Gal”. 

Due to the tune “Bounce Your Boobies”, a tune encouraging women to remove their bras, she also predated the sexual revolution slightly, and is said to the the “mother” of the sexual revolution.

Crappy Album Covers #307 — So Rockin’ it Hurts

This is a 1958 compilation on the “Waldorf Music Hall” record label, and was part of a series of cover tunes done by “middle calibre” acts of the time. This album featured The Ink Spots and Vincent Lopez.
Congo Mambo Mando & the Chili Peppers “On the Road With Rock and Roll”. Year unknown and not much else either.

Crappy Album Covers #306 — Run Toward the Bore

Tamara Faye LaValley (1942-2007), known to us adoring admirers as The Zealot Formerly Known As Tammy Faye Baaker (and later the zealot known as Tammy Faye Messner) had no hope growing up. She was the eldest of eight kids in a family where both parents were Pentacostal preachers, so adherence to Christianity was de rigeur. Becoming a Christian tele-evangelist was her fate.  In a strange twist for the Christian Right, Tammy Faye was actually popular with the LGBT community. 

I can’t explain the cover, any more than I can explain which of the two subjects in the photo is more scared.

She died of lung cancer in Kansas City, Missouri in July of 2007, and is survived by her second husband Joe Messner.
Well, I couldn’t find much on these folks, consisting of what appears to be four clean-looking Texans (five if you count the judge). 

Here, they will talk about Texas justice through the magic of song …

 

Crappy Album Covers #305 — Some guys know what to do with their trumpets, while …

Don “Jake” Jacoby (1920-1992) was a session musician for NBC and CBS, and also played solo at Carnegie Hall. He was also apparently for hire for building demolition contracts. Less risky than using dynamite, he would honk out a note that would cause a resonant reinforcement with the building, and down it comes!
Ernie Englund’s (1928-2002) notes caused resonance with female specimens that were tested. Apparently, they were not able to keep their clothes on. 

Chicago-born Ernie Englund emigrated to Sweden in 1944, where he spent most of his life. He is considered to be a Swedish composer. He died in Gotland in 2002.

 

Crappy Album Covers #304 — A Man’s Man

Widely recognized in the “so bad it’s good” category of performing, they are still discussed in many Spanish-speaking blogs, not always in the most endearing of terms. The album Vamos a la playa (Spanish for “Go to the Beach”)  is also a staple in the Crappy Album Blogosphere.

Very little straight dope exists about this duo, except that they are from Venezuela, and made their claim to fame out of a botched-up performance at a 2004 talent show where they forgot their lines.

Miranda plays Vamos a la Playa below, probably the way it was meant to be played.
Probably the brothers of three different mothers, The Omaha Loose Brothers have been described as singing “Pastoral Americana” (I think that means folk music), but there are traces of Jazz also.

This 1978 LP “A Celebration” sells for $300.00 in “very good” condition, according to gemm.com.

Miranda — Vamos a la Playa: