Album Cover Art

We made it to lucky number 13 on Gigwise.com's list of the 50 most controversial, weirdest, best and worst album covers of all time as voted on by their staff:

Controversial

13. Nurse With Wound / White House: ‘150 Murderous Passions’ – A weird cut-and-paste of a whole load of distasteful ideas and images were featured on the cover of Steven Stapleton’s fifth full-length release. Here, he is joined by Whitehouse's William Bennett during Stapleton's power electronics days (this album dates from 1981), recording thoroughly brutal, mind-wrenching ugliness.

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. Their early recordings, all made quickly, were heavily influenced by free improvisation and Krautrock and were generally considered industrial music, despite the objections of the group.

With a cover like this, it is a wonder they sold any copies at all, this has to be the worst cover I have seen on the Gigwise list (so far).

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Weird



13. Twiztid: 'Freek Show' This cover is tame compared to the last one, this is easily done with some make-up and imagination. "Freek Show" is the second studio album by Twiztid. Released on October 31, 2000, the album peaked at #51 on the Billboard 200. In his review of the album, Allmusic's Brad Mills wrote that "this kind of music appeals to a small sector of hip-hop listeners and will probably do well within their niche market, but the average hip-hop listener will just have to understand that this is a different kind of album." And a different kind of album cover as well.

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Worst


13. Heino – ‘Liebe Mutter…’: Another obscure musician, and another obscure album cover-maybe this artist is big in Germany, but I doubt it. Heino (born 13 December 1938 in Düsseldorf as Heinz Georg Kramm) is a German singer of popular music (Schlager) and traditional Volksmusik.

With his booming voice, bright blonde hair, and ever present sunglasses (due to exophthalmos), Heino is considered by many an icon of kitsch and in the English-speaking world the Latin American themes of many of his songs lending themselves to jokes about German emigration to South America after World War II.

Uhh, ok if you say so.

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Best


13. Pink Floyd: ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ Certainly one of rock & roll's most distinguished and recognizable covers of all time, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon certainly belongs here with the best. I would have even gone a bit higher.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a concept album by the British progressive rock band Pink Floyd. It was released on March 17, 1973 in the U.S. and March 24, 1973 in the UK.

The Dark Side of the Moon builds upon previous experimentation that Pink Floyd had explored in their live shows and recordings, but without the extended instrumental excursions that, according to critic David Fricke, had become characteristic of the band after founding member Syd Barrett left in 1968. Guitarist David Gilmour, Barrett's replacement, would later refer to these instrumentals as "that psychedelic noodling stuff." Gilmour and Roger Waters, the band's bassist (and principal lyricist on Dark Side), cite 1971's Meddle as a turning point toward what would be realized on The Dark Side of the Moon. The album's themes include conflict, greed, aging and mental illness (or "insanity"); the latter inspired in part by the deteriorating mental state of Barrett, who had been the band's principal composer and lyricist. The album is notable for its use of musique concrète and conceptual, philosophical lyrics, as found in much of Pink Floyd's other work.

The band's most successful release, The Dark Side of the Moon is often considered to be the group's defining work, and is still frequently ranked by music critics as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time.

The album was originally released in a gatefold LP sleeve designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie, of Nicholas Thirkell Associates, and bore Hardie's iconic refracting prism on the cover. Inside were two posters, one bearing pictures of the band in concert with the words PINK FLOYD broken up and scattered about, and the other being a slightly psychedelic image of the Great Pyramids of Giza taken on infrared film. Also included was a sheet of stickers of the pyramids. The album was also the first Pink Floyd album to have picture labels on the record where it depicted a blue prism with black background and the credits written either in grey lettering (European issues) or white lettering (US and Canadian issues). In a 1991 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, the refracting prism album cover was #35 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest album covers of all time. In 2003, VH1 named the album's cover the 4th Greatest Album Cover of All Time on their 50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time special.