Good Albums With Bad Cover Art

[Aero]

It's easy to find the worst cover art albums of all time because they've already been put on a list that everyone on the Internet has already seen. Most on that list are bands that no one has even heard of before.

But what about good albums that have equally bad cover art?

Post an image of a record that qualifies.

Here's my choice which may be surprising since it's one of my favorite bands/entities, the Alan Parsons Project. Some of their last albums had bad cover art but the worst has got to be one of their earlier records...Pyramid.

Musically, this is one of their better albums with some solid songs like: Shadow of A Lonely Man, What Goes Up, Can't Take It With You, and Pyramania.

However, the album cover to Pyramid looks like a major screw up at the printing shop. It's a crime that such a good album has such a crappy album cover.

 

[recgord27]

Best of Cream. Great music, really poor cover imo.

 

[deerwan]

Laughed out loud when I saw the Best of Cream lp because I had that
a long long time ago. Never could make any sense of the cover art.

It is hard to disassociate cover art from a good album because
even if it is fairly bad, it has been ingrained in my rock n' roll psyche
for so long that great albums w/ cruddy art I've learned to love and
live with it. Some of the lists I have to disagree with as I love a lot
those 'worse' covers. With that being said I decided that I had to
have it in my collection and really like the lp to list it, so the art had
to be dreadful and really not worthy to look at. Not to mention that
it is played very little because I have to look at the cover first, but
it is a good release otherwise. But what were they thinking with this,
worse than any K-Tel packaging ever seen on tv, just terrible... LOL

 

[recgord27]

^^^ Truly awful cover. It's Gentle Giant, so I'd probably buy the album lol
Another one that comes to mind is Joe Walsh's You can't argue with a sick mind - to me it looks like it should be a disco lp, but instead it is one of my favourite live albums of the era.

 

[Magic]

Black Sabbath - Sabotage has a god awful cover. Totally lacks imagination and a sense of art.

Actually, Black Sabbath has several album covers that are terrible.

Born Again


Paranoid

 

[That 70s Guy]

 

[Soot and Stars]

One of my top 20 albums of all time and I'm a little divided on the cover. It's pretty gaudy and kind of an odd eyesore. A floating head of dull pain strokes to make a slight resemblance to the singer. Then again the simplistic image and bland color palette is kind of perfect for the intimate, raw, echoey, sparse production that this folk masterpiece warrants. On it's own it wouldn't make anyone want to buy the album imo.

City and Colour-Bring Me Your Love

 

[deerwan]

^^^ Truly awful cover. It's Gentle Giant, so I'd probably buy the album lol
Another one that comes to mind is Joe Walsh's You can't argue with a sick mind - to me it looks like it should be a disco lp, but instead it is one of my favourite live albums of the era.

You made my weekend with this one. I am a huge Joe fan and listened
to this so much when it came out I thought something was wrong w/
me. That was prob true anyway, but it seems I was the only one
listening to it... thought it was a great album and should have been a double,
having heard the same complete show on boot. The cover
was strange but I learned to live with it... have to listen to some
JW tonight... have an incredible-sounding QUAD copy of 'So What'.

 

[recgord27]

Black Sabbath - Sabotage has a god awful cover. Totally lacks imagination and a sense of art.

Actually, Black Sabbath has several album covers that are terrible.

Yuck!! What was Bill Ward thinking?

In a similar vein, Uriah Heep's Abominog has a really bad cover, but is really one of their better ones after their initial set of classics with Ken Hensley and David Byron

 

[joker1961]

^^^ Truly awful cover. It's Gentle Giant, so I'd probably buy the album lol
Another one that comes to mind is Joe Walsh's You can't argue with a sick mind - to me it looks like it should be a disco lp, but instead it is one of my favourite live albums of the era.

Black Sabbath - Sabotage has a god awful cover. Totally lacks imagination and a sense of art.

Actually, Black Sabbath has several album covers that are terrible.

Born Again


Paranoid

totally agree with you two Magic/recgord27 sadly don't see why That 70`s Guy with the John Lennon album.... and a