The Ugliest Album Art From Rolling Stone's "1994: The 40 Best Records From Mainstream Alternative's Greatest Year"

And if the link to the article itself is hard to see up there for whatever reason:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/1994-the-40-best-records-from-mainstream-alternatives-greatest-year-20140417/

God, "mainstream alternative".

makes me nostalgic for the days when I didn't know what bad photoshop design looked like

Voted for Experimental Jet Set whatever, but am tempted to register socks to log additional votes for Dinosaur J and Soul Coughing.

for me, a toss up between Corrosion of Conformity and Sugar. Vitalogy cover has aged well!

Live is the most hideous to me, though--true story--my high school bf claimed that staring at that Pumpkins cover once made him throw up.

I was gonna post the link in the crow thread, but this works

Chris Molanphy on FB brought up something too:

This is a minor point, but one other interesting thing about the ugly-album-cover movement of 1994 was that in America, labels and record stores only began dropping the CD longbox in 1993. So when you walked into a record store in '94, for nearly the first time, it was dominated not just by CDs (that had been going on for a while) but by small plastic boxes instead of larger cardboard ones (LPs or CDs in longboxes), and the intentionally hoary album covers only compounded that ugly-is-beautiful vibe.

Vitalogy looks like a Chicago album.

Horrible though most of these are, Soul Coughing just about edge it for me.

the days of Corel Draw

I'm discounting ugly paintings, as I'm pretty sure the bands chose them for a certain degree of grotesquery. Sadly I think this means I have to discount Mellow Gold for the same reason, even though I've always found it ugly and I think its ugliness is more down to the weird focus in the clouds than the skullbeastthing sculpture. Similarly, Dookie is meant to be juvenile and a bit stupid.

The design of Unplugged in New York is pretty horrible, as are the film soundtracks, but maybe they should be treated as separate things? I don't know, I'm pretty tempted by the Nirvana, in all honesty.

Offspring album is ugly, but I could probably ignore it. Corrosion of Conformity cover is a pretty bad photoshop job, but I don't think it's quite there. Frank Black as prom queen could have worked but it bears all the hallmarks of the age's bad image software. The Bush album has an amazing array of badness - early photoshop, shit fonts (really really shit fonts), poor colour choice, bad title and I'm really not sure what the binary has to do with anything.

BUSH WIN.

sonic youth

From a bad/dated design perspective I'd go with either Toadies or Neil Young. From a "I don't really want to look at this thing" perspective, I'd go with Hole, but that might be due to me being repulsed by people with mascara running down their face.

I don't get the hate for Sonic Youth. It's not amazing, but it just looks like a zine.

Sonic Youth is a rip-off of Sister artwork but with mid-90s major label aesthetics

to me it looks like a compilation album made by the label with no input from the band, which i had always assumed it was

Gonna be a moralist and vote for korn

Actually not too bad for what they are : Rancid, Johnny Cash, Blur, Weezer, Jeff Buckley, Beastie Boys

I really like the Mellow Gold cover. Also Tori Amos.

I was going to joke that the problems with the Toadies cover really jump out at you but i just realized the dude is supposed to be drowning. that was also one that could be really inconsistent based on printing and light damage. a Google image search turns up a whole range of tint variations, all bad. (for reference, see the original painting; for fun, see the 20th anniversary cover.)

Sleeps with Angels is also really bad though it does have the remarkable effect of making me feel bad for whoever, presumably at Reprise, had to design it. it doesn't give me the sense that anyone was really passionate about the image, which makes it hard for me to vote for. "for Neil's 21st album, what if we take an extremely blurry image and just dump snippets of the lyrics of the title track all over it in Courier"

So I have to agree with emil.y. The Bush cover is bad and ugly in so many unintentional ways, though I think what specifically seals it for me is the dropshadow on the i in sixteen.

The heavy-handed paedophile imagery of Korn is pretty horrid. Weird to think of that album as 1994 - it only made it big in the UK, or at least in my social circles, around 96/97. Forever associate it with grim evenings smoking nasty soapbar hash with my anti-social high school buddies.

As it was the year I got into 'alternative' music, I have a lot of fondness for my era. There are some genuine classics in that list (Cash, Hole, Nirvana, Neil Young, Beasties) and flawed favourites like Monster, Experimental Jetset and Grace. And Dookie! Can't deny my fondness for it. And next to Blink 182 it sounds like The Exploited or Black Flag.
The artwork of this era is pretty horrid though. I had Vitalogy on vinyl - big fancy fake book format, with Victorian design and text. Thought it was the coolest thing at the time.

Voted for Live - I see Emily's point about the deliberately grotesque paintings, but the black block and naff font are just awful.

The STP album cover is pretty appalling, hard to top that.

The Rollins ain't bad. Also don't get how you could line these up and think the SY is the worst of the bunch.

the blur, johnny cash, and beastie boys ones are for me clearly the best in just about that order.

i think the tori amos cover is good, actually. same with pearl jam and nine inch nails (just now realized how much underworld's 'second toughest in the infants' cover owes to 'the downward spiral'!)

hate the liz phair, beck, soundgarden, and nirvana covers.

really though the worst for me here is 'sleeps with angels', which is probably the worst, most generic, dull, and incoherent cover art in neil young's entire career and that's really saying something. it's a great album that deserves something a lot more evocative.

Basically any of them that involve actual photography, while not great, are probably saved from being the worst.

I never really thought about the fact that Nirvana have an album with an MTV logo on the cover

This also inspired me to create a Reality Bites cover poll, at which point I discovered it had been done, albeit about the movie poster, not the album art (and somewhat poorly imo! "decaf" ≠ "dEcAf" etc.). Anyway, whoever designed the poster added an apostrophe to "hey thats my bike," but more importantly for this poll, the album art is just the same image with the phrase "MOVIE POSTER" cropped out.

Basically anything with the mid 90s typewriter font

As it was the year I got into 'alternative' music, I have a lot of fondness for my era.

Totally the opposite here. I'm lolold and have no emotional attachment to any of these, don't own a one of 'em.

Unplugged In New York looks like it was thrown together in 10 minutes without Nirvana's input, which I think kinda disqualifies it, and others like Soul Coughing are I think intentionally slapdash/ugly, but for art that actually looks like it was trying for something and failed I'm voting Toadies.

it's amazing how every single of of these albums with the possible exception of one or two are 50 cent bin fodder now.

that rem cover takes the cake for me. so embarrassing.

can't think of good New Young sleeve art tbh

'my era' should read 'this era' of course...

94 was a classic year for hip-hop. I wonder how the album covers stand up next to these? Doggystyle is hideous, while PE's Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age is terrible, but kinda awesomely so with the Skeleton holding a gun to its head while the Klansman and the white politician laugh on...

Jesus Christ I can't believe Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age is 20 years old! Every time I see that album title it seems so freshly horrible.

Weird how the first couple of REM albums have great, evocative covers, then they just go to shit, with maybe the exception of New Adventures (a bit boring, but Stipe's b&w photo is nice enough). I can see what they were going for with Monster's trashy aesthetic, but it's poorly executed. But it's less ugly than Green and Out Of Time's horrible washed out greens and yellows.

Illmatic and Ready To Die on the other hand... the fonts date them, but the images are pretty iconic.

can't think of good New Young sleeve art tbh

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:17 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think up through 'comes a time' neil young covers are pretty stellar

I think objectively Neil Young might be worse but I so intensely hate everything about the Offspring that I can't not vote for that

There are nice ones like On The Beach and Time Fades Away but Neil does tend to have an agressively cruddy aesthetic about half the time. Zuma literally gives you the finger.

http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/5561/neilyoungcrazyhorsezumayl0.jpg

I would argue that Ruby Vroom was the only good Soul Coughing cover. It's indeed slapdash but it feels at least semi-classic to me!

CASH is the best

I feel crazy saying this, but these are not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

You are crazy.

something about the cheap photoshop jobs of the time just seems kind of quaint to me as opposed to hideous

I think I might vote for the Sugar album because it is so half-assed and generic, although I may be choosing it in part because that album was such a disappointment to me when it came out.

i don't think i've ever realized how terrible the nirvana unplugged cover is. it's by no means the worst, it's just...taking a decent picture and making it as ugly as possible

Hard to choose between Neil and Sugar.

But this reminds me that I listened to Grace a few weeks ago for the first time in 8 or 9 years and wow, that album really did not age well at all.

honestly though, I can live with most of the top 20, plenty of them are even good or at least iconic. The bottom twenty start to get more into the ugly zone, but a lot of them embody the low budget DIY aesthetic that was in vogue at the time or just come across as lazy "product" without any pretense of trying to look interesting

neil's is generic 90s alt and stupid but ultimately pretty forgettable and harmless. (a lot neil's cover art is terrible but there are some absolutely classic covers too - all the ditch trilogy covers are awesome, i like zuma, too)

i hate the blur cover. all those dumb britpop bands that have a fucking logo. fuck off, blur sucks

i think the tori amos cover is good, actually. same with pearl jam and nine inch nails (just now realized how much underworld's 'second toughest in the infants' cover owes to 'the downward spiral'!)

I think I listened to the Underworld in a listening tower at Blockbuster Music solely because the album cover looked like NIN.

Johnny Cash, Tori Amos, and Weezer are all pretty good and also all basically the same album cover

I like the Weezer cover a lot; has always reminded me of The Feelies:

http://bern.hitparade.ch/cdimg/weezer-weezer_(the_blue_album)_a.jpg
http://bern.hitparade.ch/cdimg/weezer-weezer_(the_blue_album)_a.jpg

Dammit.

http://0.tqn.com/d/altmusic/1/0/D/B/-/-/thefeelies.jpg

yeah i wonder is that an purposeful reference? it seems so close...but weezer seems like dudes that were probably not as hip musically as you'd think so who knows if they even knew the feelies?

i'm pretty sure it's a reference

Yeah, it's actually kind of a knowing cross between Feelies and T. Heads I think.

http://www.billepperly.com.php53-14.ord1-1.websitetestlink.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/T-Heads1-150x150.jpg

Got to be "Sleeps With Angels" I held a grudge against that record for a long time cuz of the cover. I still don't evne like touching it. Blech.

lol as if Weezer designed their cover!

Weezer album cover is good as, without knowing the ins and outs of the band, it doesnt scream 1994 like so many of these

90s yes, but some of these are ridiculously date specific to me

Are the Meat Puppets recent efforts the 50 something 80s Amerindie version of those Neil Young /Clapton album covers (Fork In The Road/Old Sock)?

Sugar cover so bad and half-assed. Facebook macros are designed better.

Also '94:

http://www.recordrevolution.com/sites/default/files/album_covers/sebadoh_bakesale.jpg

Srsly the fact that that cover isn't even on this list just fatally indicts the whole year

Well the list is not bad covers just RS' s favoeite albums, but point still taken!

i feel like echolyn's "as the world" (a christian prog band influenced by gentle giant who were signed by sony, apparently as some sort of tax write-off, in '95) could beat any record on this list in terms of "terrible cover"

Wow, when Oasis are an example of good design you know the field is awful. So much horrible.

Whoops yeah that ws posting at 4am talking

it is massively depressing to think beck and blur are the least offensive at anything

I really like the cover to Monster, I can't be the only one, surely? can we at least agree it's better than any post-90s REM album cover?

I think Monster looks a lot better on an actual CD case than it comes across as a picture on a computer screen, and it definitely wouldn't work on a 12 inch LP cover

I thought that this was going to be a straight-up competition between Dinosaur Jr and Live but then I saw that Korn album cover and holy shit.

A lot of these do look like album covers for bands who were suddenly catapulted into a commercial arena in which they were so out of their depth and ended up either just trolling everyone or getting their record company to produce something totally half-arsed.

I get that the Dinosaur Jr one is meant to be ugly but I hate Dinosaur Jr and that cover really evokes why, but fuck knows what that Throwing Copper one is supposed to be.

I do remember going into Our Price and being able to immediately spot a whole shelf full of Monster spines right behind the counter.

Korn is straight up horror movie trope, whereas AiC is "let's compare a jar of puke-orange translucent honey with flies in it with a possibly-decapitated head of an eleven year old girl"

xp

(Idk why I felt the need to offer a retort to Matt DC)

I voted Sixteen Stone. I didn't buy the album several times simply cos of it as a teen.

then I heard the music which sealed it

Could do the same with 1994 movie posters.

http://www.retrorobotreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Ref-1994-movie-poster.jpeg

CAPTURE THE LAUGHS

Judy Davis stares longfully at Leary's crotch

A few of these covers aren't pleasing to the eye, but Sleeps With Angels is just fucking next-level shite.

A couple years later, but prime example of when Print Shop goes bad:

http://projectyuck.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/cult_of_ray.jpg

Toss-up between Without a Sound and Purple, went for STP in the end

Offspring's Smash hands down

this is pretty much all-my-first-albums-the-list. thanks to my shitty concept of time, i now know that 1994 was the year music first resonated with me. interesting.

also voted liz phair because what is that

the stp one is annoying but for whatever reason i find it sort of enjoyable to hate? whereas the korn and aic ones are terrible but also just make me angrier the more i think about bands like that playing domestic violence / violence towards children for shock value

that doesn't describe AiC whatsoever, wtf

violence towards flies for shock value, imo.

marketed to flies

idk the flies + detached body parts things strikes me as kinda violent

and i haven't like brushed up on my semiotics recently but i always thought the use of dolls in a lot of '90s imagery was trying to evoke tainted/dysfunctional childhood stuff

it was inspired by a science experiment Cantrell did in school iirc, where they had two jars of flies, underfed one, overfed the other, and the one that was overfed survived...and it apparently stuck w/ him for years.

their music was already too adult for kids anyway as it was primarily about heroin addiction. they were my fav band in high school but it wasn't lost on me how morbidly depressing the music was.

whereas Korn wrote fairly exclusively about that child abuse stuff on their first album and the cover kind of emphasized that even more.

I'm not certain that any of the visible body parts on the AiC cover are visibly detached.

yeah tbh i might just be reaching for more reasons to hate aic. i always assumed it was a doll

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

huh i guess i never thought of sleeps with angels as particularly ugly
not great or anything just never seemed that noteworthy compared to some of these hideous ones

It's so very of its time.

Lol at Beck sounding like Bill O Riley with that "i didn't have ~time~ to be depressed when i was poor and hustlin" crap