Sunday, October 12, 2008

Album Cover Art

Let's continue our look at Gigwise.com's list of the top 50 most controversial, the weirdest, best and worst album covers as compiled by their crack staff.

Controversial


17. The Exploited: ‘Jesus Is Dead’ (1986 EP)– Oh, yeah, this album cover will work, no controversy here. The Exploited is a punk band from the second wave of UK punk, formed in 1979. They started out as an Oi! band, before mutating into a faster street punk and hardcore punk band. From about 1987 on (around the time of Death Before Dishonour) they changed into a crossover thrash band. Formed in Edinburgh by ex-soldier Wattie Buchan, they signed to Secret Records in March 1981 and released their debut EP Army Life. The album Punks Not Dead followed in the same year. Despite many lineup changes, the band continued into the 2000s and has developed a worldwide following. The band has garnered a sizable hardcore audience in the U.K. for its anti-authoritarian stance and criticism of the government, particularly in the Reagan/Thatcher era, but their following is not quite as large in the U.S. and has declined somewhat in Britain over the years.

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Weirdest


17. Nurse With Wound: 'Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella' Great cover and I would agree just a bit on the weird side. But, I love leather and certainly a dominatrix complete with boobs hanging out gets on my list.

Nurse with Wound (or shortened as NWW) is the main recording name for British musician Steven Stapleton. Nurse with Wound was originally a band, formed in 1978 by Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak. The band ranges in many genres such as avant-garde, industrial, noise, dark ambient, and drone.

The title comes from a sentence by Comte de Lautréamont. The album enjoys a reputation as one of the most singular debuts of all time. It is described by AllMusic as "one of the more glowing examples of late 70's industrial noise" and defunct UK music magazine Sounds summed up their response by abandoning their usual star rating system to award the album a full 5 question marks.

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Worst


17. Boned – ‘Up At The Crack’ On a list of all-time worst album covers? Yes, I agree and not much more needs to be said; a picture is worth a thousand words.

Prior to this album's release and under the pseudonym of 'AC/DD' the band placed some of the finished tracks on the internet.

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Best


17. Joy Division: ‘Unknown Pleasures’ Unknown Pleasures is the debut album by the English post-punk band Joy Division. Released in 1979, the album was recorded and produced for Factory Records by Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, England. The album did not sell well, but due to the subsequent success of Joy Division with the hit single "Love Will Tear Us Apart," it is now much more well-known.

The front cover image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background. It presents exactly 100 successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, PSR B1919+21 (often referred to in the context of this album by its older name, CP 1919). The cover design is credited to Joy Division, Peter Saville and Chris Mathan. The back cover of the album contains no track listings, leaving a blank table where one would expect the listings to be.

The original LP release contained no track information on the labels, nor the traditional "side one" and "side two" designations. The ostensible "side one" was labeled Outside and displayed a reproduction of the image on the album cover, while the other side was labeled Inside and displayed the same image with the colors reversed (black-on-white). Track information and album credits appeared on the inner sleeve only.

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