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Spooktacular album covers for Halloween

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Fuck Winter—Halloween’s coming!

Moving apartment, packing and unpacking boxes of belongings, I rediscovered a few old LPs and cassette recordings of the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and David McCallum telling tales of terrible things I’d long forgotten. Suppressed memory, you might say. It was quite a discovery, happy and sad, like finding photographs of long lost lovers and knowing the reason you split and why you were such a dick. Recordings of horror stories which were once so very, very important but now much less so. Perhaps

These were recordings of the very best reading great tales that could entice, enthral, and entertain.

I still listen to such today. Downloading podcasts of The Horror from Relic Radio, or listening to Old Time Radio classic tales by Wyllis Cooper and Arch Obler for Lights Out, or those other shows like Suspense, Himan Brown’s Inner Sanctum, The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave, or E. G. Marshall and his three-act The CBS Mystery Hour.. Today’s equivalent is the wonderful podcast series Tales from Beyond the Pale devised and produced by Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid.

It’s not that entertainment was somehow better in the past, it is rather there was a bigger and more diverse range of imaginative material produced than all the tawdry remakes, or the repetitive Marvel superhero movies or the tick-box detective shows/sci-fi series available 24/7 today. Imagination has had its wings clipped by money, politics and Twitter mobs, and will never fly to giddy heights in a cage.

But back to the point of this post: Halloween’s coming. And here to get in the mood is a gallery of vintage album covers featuring some of biggest names in movies and entertainment (Karloff, Lugosi, Price, McCallum) reading classic tales of terror and imagination. Plus a few novelty records to show not everything was golden in the past…
 
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More eerie album covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.16.2019
08:33 am
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Some favorite record covers with one letter removed
08.28.2018
08:55 am
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A misplaced letter can make a whole lot of difference, as anyone who’s seen that classic episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm knows. In that particular show, poor old Larry caused righteous outrage after his obituary notice for a “beloved aunt” had one vowel replaced with a consonant.

The Internet is good at making you aware of how frequently things are repeated with often differing results. Sometimes they’re diminished, sometimes improved. A few years back, Reddit featured a thread of band names with one letter replaced. This led onto Pigeons & Planes making a series of album covers with one letter missing.

Returning to this theme, the various creative talents at b3ta have come up with a whole new batch of record covers with one letter absent, most of which, like some of their predecessors, are pretty damned amusing—though tbh I’m not quite sure if there is any letter missing from the Coldplay cover…

See more than 230 other record covers with one letter missing here.
 
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More classic album covers minus a letter, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.28.2018
08:55 am
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THE HORROR: Clown-themed album covers
08.17.2018
05:38 am
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Coulrophobia is a neologism used to describe a fear of clowns—or really by the word’s derivation, a fear of stilt-walkers.

I can attest for the fear clowns can instil in some people. I once worked as a clown. My job was handing out fliers for an electrical showroom. I had to hit on unsuspecting families: give the kids a balloon, then hit the parents with a too-good-to-be-true hire-purchase deal on TVs, radios, Walkmans, fridge-freezers, cookers, that kinda thing. Thinking about it now, my job was in many ways a fair description of what makes a clown—someone who seems to be ultra-friendly and fun but is in fact a devious and calculating fuck with unimaginable intentions.

Starting at the feet: I wore black size-thirteen comedy boots. I had a frilly red, white and blue costume with three big pom-poms on the front. I had padded white gloves that made my hands look cartoonish and made it exceedingly difficult to hold balloons and peel-off fliers. I had a multi-colored wig and a red hat. But I didn’t get the make-up. That was way too pricey. Instead, I had a disgusting and well-used (who knows what for..) old rubber clown mask, that someone had embellished with grotesque clown make-up which was beginning to flake off. It kinda made me look like a zombie clown who’d just escaped the crypt. Of course, I had to have a name, so I chose Pogo the Clown—which no-one seemed to appreciate other than thinking it was me just adding a couple of “o’s” to my initials. This was the west coast of Scotland not Cook County, Illinois. Not only did I look horrific, I had that grim moniker too.

But companies don’t give a shit about things like that when there’s money to be made. Off I went, down the busy high street, zooming in on families on their day out. I had no idea what to expect, other than feeling none too keen on twisting the arms of moms and mads into spending money they didn’t necessarily have. Times were hard. Money was tight. Unemployment at an all time high. Thankfully, I was not on commission otherwise poor Pogo would have starved. However, what I did not expect was the look of sheer unadulterated horror on some kids’ faces when I greeted them. These poor lambs would struggle to break free of their parents grasp and sometimes run as fast as they could in the opposite direction. Their foolish parents would laugh and joke and coo about it being just Pogo the friendly clown, and drag their traumatized offspring back to shake my unwieldy hand and get a free balloon. If you were one of those poor damned kids, well, tough. At least you gotta free balloon and an experience you’re still paying an analyst to fix.

Anyhoo…

In my innocence, I never knew the sheer dread, the sheer horror, the sheer pant-shitting terror clowns cause some people. And I’m fairly sure, these kind of poor unfortunates won’t have any of the following classic clown-covered vinyl in their record collections. And I don’t blame them. For who in their right mind would have this shit in their home other than serial killers and clowns.
 
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More ghastly clown vinyl, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.17.2018
05:38 am
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Like Tinder for desperate people: Unsettlingly bad Europop record covers
01.23.2018
10:06 am
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I have a pet theory (I call him Malcolm, he likes having his tummy rubbed) that posits the suggestion that maybe vinyl declined all those years ago because there were so many shit covers around. It is possible. Too many shit covers meant people didn’t want their lack of taste in music to be seen by their cool friends, so sales dropped until downloads arrived when nobody knows what shit you’re listening to on your iPod.

I mean, we all have guilty secrets about music, you know, bands we’re not supposed to like but we always seem to find there’s just that one track that awful band did way back when that always hits the spot when we’re feeling all mushy inside or very, very drunk or just loved up on way too many eccies or even possibly having no fucking taste in music whatsoever. You know the kind of thing. If you don’t, well you haven’t been paying attention.

Having a sneaky little taste for something outré or déclassé or just fucking shit meant, back then at least, having to buy the goddam vinyl (there were no downloads then, kids, see above). This meant you would always have the unfortunate evidence of your guilty little pleasure on display for every fuckwit who browsed through your record collection and never let you live it down.

Which, by long way of a preamble, brings me to this fucking collection of shit covers from the 1970s and 1980s that were (somehow) available in Europe, well, primarily Holland, to be fair. Some of these covers look like the profile pics for would-be serial killers on Tinder. These are obviously the kind of covers made by foolhardy record execs who say things like “Who needs a designer, my son’s gotta camera, he can do it….” And you know what, he did.
 
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More tasteless record art, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.23.2018
10:06 am
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Back cat-a-log: Classic album covers ‘purrfectly’ re-imagined with kittens
12.12.2017
09:39 am
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Purr Division—‘Unknown Whiskers.’
 
Cats on the covers of your favorite music—what’s not to like?

On those odd occasions when I finish reading the funnies and have nothing more practical to do, I like to ponder those big meaningful questions of life like what happens to all those sites and pages that grab their fifteen minutes and then disappear just as quickly (or are lost in the mix) as the next distraction claims its time?

Way back in 2011, musician, designer, record label CEO, and seller of vintage posters Alfra Martini seemed to be everywhere when her blog The Kitten Covers made (literally) international headlines.

Martini’s blog was a simple idea that came to her in a “fever dream.” It was also, apparently, inspired by that famous painting of dogs playing poker around a green baize table. Her idea was to recreate classic album covers with cute little furry felines. Martini’s first attempt was the cover of a David Bowie album which (understandably) impressed her boyfriend and everyone else who saw it. A meme was born, shall we say, and those first album covers were shared far and wide. Then there came the media coverage and even an interview or two.

But then what?

Martini continued making her covers with cats but all that fame and frenzy (and maybe I’m wrong here) seemed to slowly ebb away—or maybe I stopped paying attention. Which is a shame, as some of Martini’s best Kitten Covers came after the big-fifteen minute fame bubble of 2011. Maybe a lack of interest or a lack of time led Martini to stop making her kitty covers in 2016—or maybe she’s having a sabbatical away from such creative fun, I dunno. Whichever, here are some of the choice Kitten Covers you may have missed.
 
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The K-52s.
 
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Meowerhead—‘Ace of Spayeds.’
 
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The Jesus and Meowy Chain—‘Psycho Catty.’
 
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KWA—‘Straight Outta Cat Town.’
 
More cat covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.12.2017
09:39 am
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These are probably the worst album covers ever created
04.11.2017
01:09 pm
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Although I could be wrong, in my opinion these are some of the worst album covers I’ve ever seen. A few of these covers have been making the rounds on the Internet for a least a decade (so they’ll probably look familiar to you). Others were new to me and simply godawful but totally funny at the same time. What in the hell were they thinking?

Feel free to add your “worst album cover” in the comments section here on Dangerous Minds or on our Facebook page. I’m curious to see them. I need a good laugh today. But don’t we all?


 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.11.2017
01:09 pm
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Terrible, awful, no good, really bad heavy metal album covers from all over the world


The cover of the 1998 album by Blue Öyster Cult, ‘Heaven Forbid.’
 
I know that any and every kinda blog post about album covers has been done before, including, of course, ones that choose to focus on the world of heavy metal album art. But here’s the thing—the genre really brings it when it comes to awful execution to say nothing of the bizarre concepts that somehow got to adorn the various covers you’re about to see, such as scantily clad girls with big hair, muscle-bound men with swords and/or angry animals. And I’m merely scratching the surface of what can be seen on the cover of a heavy metal album because, as I’ve come to find out, pretty much anything from vampires to fucking ostriches shooting laser beams out of their eyes goes

While there are a plethora of obscure metal bands featured in this post from Spain to Germany, there are also a number of high-profile bands that put out records with shitty covers like the Scorpions, Blue Öyster Cult, Iron Maiden, and Pantera. As a matter of fact, there are no less than three perfectly awful Pantera album covers in this post that I’m sure alledgedly aspiring bootboy Phil Anselmo will somehow blame on too much “white wine.” (I think he means “white whine”?) Racists are so hilarious when they’re drunk, aren’t they?

Some of the images in this post are perplexingly NSFW.
 

The cover of the 2013 album by Adema, ‘Topple the Giants.’
 

Fastway ‘Bad Bad Girls’ 1990.
 
More entirely questionable metal mayhem, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.09.2017
08:28 am
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R-rated illustrated album covers & rare racy bootlegs from Joy Division, The Cure & Serge Gainsbourg


The cover of the 1987 single ‘Lachez les chiens!’ by French group Super Nana by artist Aslan (aka Alain Gourdon).
 
You may be familiar with the work of the French illustrator known as “Aslan” or Alain Gourdon. Best known for his pin-ups Aslan was a contributor to French magazine Lui starting in 1963 where he would illustrate a different, gorgeously realistic pin-up for Lui each month for nearly 20 years.

Aslan was not only an incredibly talented illustrator and painter but was also quite adept at the art of sculpture. His 1970 bust of French starlet Brigitte Bardot as “Marianne” (one of a number of female images that have been used as a symbol representing the French republic) was the first bust promoted by the Louvre Museum while the author/creator was still living. In the last thirty or so years “Marianne” has been portrayed in the image of other female French icons such as actress Catherine Deneuve model Laetitia Casta. Naturally Aslan’s bust of “Marianne” features a plunging neckline revealing a lot of eye-popping sculpted cleavage.

When it comes to Aslan’s pin-ups for Lui there aren’t very many I can show you here as they are all pretty much gorgeously done X-rated illustrations featuring full-frontal nudity (you can see them here if you’d like). That said, I’m barely going to get away with showing you Aslan’s cool album covers especially when it comes to a bootleg of a performance by The Cure in Amsterdam in 1979 (see bottom) which was apparently used without his permission. The rest—including the illustration that was used for a Joy Division bootleg called “Enigma” that was apparently sanctioned by Aslan (part of a cavalcade of unofficial Joy Division pressings from the 80s that were released following vocalist Ian Curtis’s suicide—are still about as cheeky as they come.

I’ve also included a nice selection of album covers done by Aslan for Fontana Records (an offshoot of Dutch music label Phillips) that were all part of Fontana’s Après Minuit releases that featured artists like Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Hallyday and jazz great Chet Baker. Like I said, the images in this post, while gorgeous, are most definitely NSFW. If you’ve just become a fan of Aslan and want to see more, I highly recommend seeking out the many pulp novels with his naughty illustrations on the covers.
 

An illustration done by Aslan on the cover of ‘Enigma’ a Joy Division bootleg from 1980.
 

The Cure ‘The Spell’s Unbroken’ bootleg from a live performance from 1985 at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, UK with pin-up art by Aslan.
 
Many more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.02.2016
09:27 am
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Classic metal album covers get retro makeovers
01.07.2015
04:21 pm
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RUST IN PEACE
Megadeth, Rust In Peace
 
Brazilian designer Rafael Melandi is the Creative Director at the São Paulo agency Opera Communications, but this wonderful project of his has very little of the operatic to it, unless you count histrionic singing: he’s redesigned classic heavy metal LP covers in the high-modern style associated with mid-century jazz album art. Melandi’s created a portfolio of this work, called “Metazz,” on his Behance page, which shows that this is quite out of character in the context of his usual professional work. Clearly this was a labor of love. I definitely love it.
 
PARANOID
Black Sabbath, Paranoid
 
MASTER OF PUPPETS
Metallica, Master Of Puppets
 
AMONG THE LIVING
Anthrax, Among The Living
 
ARISE
Sepultura, Arise
 
ACE OF SPADES
Motörhead, Ace of Spades
 
REIGN IN BLOOD
Slayer, Reign In Blood
 
VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER
Pantera, Vulgar Display of Power
 
POWERSLAVE
Iron Maiden, Powerslave
 
BRITISH STEEL
Judas Priest, British Steel
 
via Metalsucks

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Metal albums with googly eyes
Iconic heavy metal album covers turned into coloring book for kids
A 7-year-old’s drawings of classic rap albums

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.07.2015
04:21 pm
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Beatboxing classic album covers come to life
10.20.2014
05:03 pm
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Israeli artist and director Vania Heymann started creating videos when he was a student at Bezalal Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. He has been praised by the likes of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and atheist author Sam Harris. His latest video (made with his frequent collaborator Israeli musician Roy Kafri who provides the beatboxing with his song “Mayokero”) has a series of classic albums covers from bands like The Smiths, ABBA, David Bowie and Prince move their “mouths” and sing along.
 

Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.20.2014
05:03 pm
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Famous album covers overlaid onto Google Street View
04.08.2014
08:38 am
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Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Jones Street, West Village, New York City
 
This idea may have been done before this, but I can’t remember seeing it before now. Lots of notable album covers were taken in city streets, so why not overlay some popular album covers onto Google Street View? I once had to take a picture of the building on the cover of Physical Graffiti for a scavenger hunt, so I know exactly where that one is. (You’d never notice it just walking around. For one thing, the big red letters are missing.) I’ve been to London a dozen times and I’ve never done the Abbey Road saunter. I think I’ve been to Ludlow and Rivington and thought about Paul’s Boutique once, not sure.
 
Rush
Moving Pictures, Rush. Ontario Legislature, Toronto
 
Led Zeppelin
Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin. St. Mark’s Place, East Village, New York City

 
Pink Floyd
Animals, Pink Floyd. Battersea Power Station, Wandsworth, London
 
Jackson Browne
Late for the Sky, Jackson Browne. Hancock Park, Los Angeles
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.08.2014
08:38 am
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Famous album covers rendered in Lego
01.10.2014
09:16 am
Topics:
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Roxy Music, Country Life
 
Someone’s created a Tumblr of famous record albums that have been “pixelated” and turned into 40"x40” Lego grids. They’re quite nice.

These Lego albums are so well—one might say perfectly—executed that I find myself wondering about the color choices available to Lego users—these covers appear to use every color in the Pantone universe. I suppose if you’re using Lego Digital Designer, you can use these colors.

Which begs the question: Are these actual Lego constructions or were they made in Lego Digital Designer? And if they were made in Lego Digital Designer, does that make them any less real?

The albums pictured here are so well known that I’m not going to bother identifying them—the Tumblr itself ranges more widely across the musical spectrum.
 
The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed
 
Talking Heads, Remain in Light
 
Michael Jackson, Thriller
 
Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy
 
Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Airplane Over the Sea
 
The Velvet Underground, Loaded
 
Inevitably, here’s The White Stripes, “Fell in Love with a Girl”:

 
via Ufunk

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
DEVO light switch plate made of LEGO pieces
Stop-motion LEGO ‘Dr. Strangelove’

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.10.2014
09:16 am
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