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

The Beck cover is amazing and complements the music perfectly

The worst is either Bush or Bad Religion, and they're both entirely loathsome. Might vote Bush - it's fucking disgusting actually

i feel like the entire rykodisc aesthetic led to shitty covers. i don't know why. maybe the covers weren't any worse than other labels and it was just the sickly doctor's office waiting room green of the jewel cases that did it.

american thighs cover is gorgeous imo

yeah that's a real good cover

in a weird way i kinda respect the nirvana mtv one, w/ that album it'd be so easy to overplay the reverance and make it seem like 'here stands a testament to tragedy and genius', god knows that album actually played that way in the culture that winter, like the pop equivalent of playing an old answering machine message or staring at old photos, but the cover works as a rebuke as if to say 'yeah it's very sad and the music is great which is nice but let's be clear - this is a cash-in'.

vitalogy cover and art kinda secretly blew my mind as a 12 yo

never really thought about it before but the 'exile in guyville' cover is pretty bad.

xp I picked up the vinyl Vitalogy at a big garage sale in '98, and was very impressed w/the lp sized booklet and overall design.

vitalogy cover and art kinda secretly blew my mind as a 12 yo

― mattresslessness, Thursday, April 17, 2014 5:39 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha, yea me too. even as a 12 year old i didn't think the music was that good though.

also i know we're talking about album covers here but w/r/t music i really love nirvana unplugged. i don't engage much with all the critical discourse on nirvana, after being exposed to it so much for 20 years, so i don't know what the consensus is on that album. but i feel like i listen to it 50x more than the rest of nirvana. don't know if this is akin to imago's comment that he likes electric wizard more than black sabbath but i really prefer unplugged.

I blasted "Corduroy" a lot in my freshman dorm, my neighbors probably hated me

agree w/ marcos, unplugged doesn't really feel like a 'live' album so much as a great lost nirvana album, something as complete and satisfying (or moreso) as any of their studio work.

it's one of those small wonders, the show was kind of a gimmick at that point, nirvana didn't strike me as a band that would translate particularly well to an acoustic context, but there was a certain magic there

Bush

A really good friend who geeked out on a lot of the same music as me gave me this album for my birthday and I just looked at him like 'really dude' and he was all 'you know it's a really good album you should give it a chance'

*gasface*

Don't recall ever hearing anyone slate Unplugged, responses seem to all be in the "that's pretty good" to "their unheralded masterpiece" range. I suppose the conjunction of acoustic (=stripped down=vulnerable somehow) and tragedy makes that more predictable, but I'd say it stands up even if you try to forget connotation.

i wouldn't be surprised if their bowie and leadbelly covers from that album get more radio play than all of their nevermind/in utero singles. unplugged is definitely the nirvana album it's safe for WXRT/dadrock rolling stone types to own more than the others.

hahaha I wasn't in Chicago when it was released but I distinctly remember thinking at the time, "Man, I bet this Nirvana record is burning up XRT" (between blocks of Poi Dog Pondering, of course).

kurt's final anguished "where...did you sleep...last night???" followed by applause fading right into the intro for the cover of "wild night" by john mellencamp.

hahaha

Meat Puppets one is disappointing in the sense that most of their previous album covers had been cool surreal drawings by the band and then they suddenly flipped the script

OTM, also their later album covers are nearly all terrible, Too High to Die is the only one that's just boring.

I like Unplugged, I probably like the Meat Puppets bit best of all

TBH I get tired of the sound of his guitar after a while (in this context). But I suppose that's me having a pop at Cobain for sounding like...Cobain

The recent Meat Puppets albums covers are laughably bad.

a major label put this out

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/30/No_Joke%21.gif

idk if this is heresy but I really hate that Dinosaur Jr cover

Monster cover struck me as singularly dreadful at the time.

I think adding an image to a record is usually a bad idea. Like covers on a book. Nothing to do with what's inside...

Also: taking sides - White Album vs Spinal tap's Black Album.

enjoyed whiney's circumspect blurb for ruby vroom

a lot of these are lazy or half-assed or lolsomely obvious, but the only ones i really hate are mellow gold and jar of flies. and it's hard to distinguish the latter from my hatred of the music

jar of flies was grammy nominated for best recording package!

are you gonna make me mention jethro tull

xp^^Didn't the first pressings come with plastic flies inside the jewelcase, or was I smoking crack when I was 12?

i didn't say they won!

o man that's right, there were little plastic flies in the spine

i don't doubt that jar of flies was carefully crafted to piss me off, but i do think it's ugly as fuc

mellow gold bears the brunt of ugliness and failed irony tho

Live or STP or Sugar. Tough decision.

that liz phair one is insanely bad

I kinda dig the vibe of the Jar of Flies cover--reminds me of the movie Tollbooth--but it def strikes me as the single gauchest cover of the bunch...

Mellow Gold the most divisive cover here - makes me like it more

The Jar of Flies cover made it into the claymation I Stay Away video.

The weird breed of sheep dog on the cover of Odelay is also in the 16 Stone booklet somewhere.

Pisces Iscariot has different covers for cd, vinyl, tape -- all blurry, weird photographs.

I have never seen Meat Puppets No Joke before this moment, and I am actually lolling in the office. Words fail.

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)?