Last week Dangerous Minds brought you a gallery of the worst album covers ever created. It was a fine sampling, showcasing some of the best of the worst, but my own personal favorite genre of “bad album art” was under-represented. I’m talking about, of course, the private-press gospel record with double-entendre title.

Now, most of these records generally fall into two categories: titles about someone being touched and titles about someone coming, in one instance “quarts of love.”

Usually, the naïve graphics on the covers sell the unintentional jokes.

Below are some of my favorites. If I missed any, let me know in the comments!
 

 

 
Many more questionably-titled Christian album covers after the jump…

 
“Metal Art Abominations,” a group dedicated to producing shitty, childlike renderings of iconic metal albums is so kvlt that they don’t allow Photoshop or MS Paint images—according to “rule 1” on their Facebook page, all submissions “MUST be created on a smartphone with a mobile app (we recommend Sketch). We can’t have people showing us up using Microsoft Paint, Photoshop etc.”

I’ve always been a sucker for these type of art projects which are truly a product of the Internet age. Though “Metal Art Abominations,” isn’t really a new idea, indeed we’ve covered similar territory before here at Dangerous Minds, there’s something extra sardonic about these ultra-crude fabrications of “brutal”  LP covers. The more seriously gory or satanic the original version is, the more effective the “abomination” version becomes. One also can’t help but laugh at a group that takes its mission so seriously that MS Paint is considered too refined of a tool. Even the 1:1 aspect ratios of the original album jackets are eschewed in favor of portrait mode of the phone app designs, making this purely throw-away glorious garbage art.

Here’s a gallery of personal favorites, but there’s dozens more over at the Metal Art Abominations page. 
 

 

 
More of this shit after the jump…

 
Being taught by Christian brothers from an early age, my sex education amounted to little more than “If you do it, it’s a sin and you’re going to Hell. If you don’t do it, you’re still going to Hell—because you’ve thought about doing it anyway and that’s still a sin, you dirty little bastards.” My father was more pragmatic—“I’ll tell you all about the birds and bees when you’re thirteen.” When I hit my teens, he said, “Well, if you don’t know it by now, then you never will.”

Sex education was embarrassing for both sides of the equation. Parents didn’t know what to say, while a lot of the kids could have probably taught their elders a thing or two. Still nobody between the generations really wanted to talk to each other about sex—well, unless they were Swedish because everyone knew the Swedes talked about sex all the time. That and flat-pack furniture—or so we believed back then. It was the 1970s and nothing had really progressed, though everyone acted as if it had.

Nowadays, things may be far more open and sex ed taught with the same verve as say woodwork or math or citizenship. But the difficulties of discussing sex, sexuality, and the changes arriving with puberty were very real for many people in the ye olden days. I know. I was there.

So imagine my surprise to find that Americans could once upon a time pick up an LP from their local record store that either gave youngsters sex advice or parents tips on how to discuss the subject with their offspring. Albums parents could even hide in plain sight amongst their easy listening collection—somewhere between Bert Kaempfert and The Sandpipers. These well-meaning discs included a priest (Father Filas) advising parents on what to tell their children about sex (like HE would know); the host of Kids Say the Darndest Things Art Linkletter narrating the story of “Where do I come from?”; and a Dr. Morris Fishbein giving advice to growing girls.

This, people, was once a thing. 

What I’d like to know—did anyone (aside from Madlib perhaps) actually listen to these records? And if so are they still traumatized?
 

 

 
More goofball sex ed albums, after the jump…

Drawings of stage configurations for a band called “Sweat” and a drawing of Darth Vader found inside a copy of KISS’ ‘Rock And Roll Over.’
 
The Instagram account, thingsifoundinrecords, run by Jeff Ogiba—co-owner of Brooklyn’s Black Gold record shop— has only been at it for a few months, but it’s already one of the best things on the Internet (if you’re a complete record nerd). The account is a repository for—as the title would suggest—weird things that people have found inside of record sleeves.

Jeff tells Dangerous Minds that he first got into collecting the ephemera found in old records when he found a clipping in a copy of Electric Warrior outlining the death of Marc Bolan.
 

 
He goes on to detail the craziest thing he ever found—a cache of handwritten letters between two married men who fell in love in 1975, Los Angeles. One man was an airline pilot and the other an actor. “I wouldn’t want to upset your family either. Let this memory be ours to keep.” These were found inside a copy of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Jeff views crates of used vinyl as conduits for making connections to the past—both with the recorded music, and with the prior owners of the physical product itself: “finding stuff in records just enhances your connection with the previous owner. Buying collections is, in a sense, a modern archeology of sorts concerning the person you got the records from.”

“And it’s fun,” he adds.

If you have your own weird shit found inside record sleeves, you can post it to Instagram and tag @thingsifoundinrecords—they’ll add your treasures to the collection. Personally, I’ve got piles of things I’ll eventually get around to submitting, but I’ll share this one here first as a Dangerous Minds “exclusive”:

A copy of Raven’s 1986 album The Pack Is Back that contained a sealed envelope addressed to “Parents of Paul West.” Inside the envelope was a failing pre-algebra test with Paul’s pencil-drawings of the Batman logo and some rocker dude who I’m going to go out on a limb and guess is Motley Crue’s mascot: Allister Fiend.
 

 

Uh-oh, Paul.
 

“Thought you might like to be aware of Paul’s 1st grade of the 4th six weeks and his artwork again. Any suggestions?” Paul scored a “50” on the test.
 
More of our favorite posts from thingsifoundinrecords after the jump…
 

 
Looking like a fabulous re-issue series from some faraway and highly tasteful land, I find these fantasy classic rock LP minimalist graphic re-workings totally irresistible.
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…