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

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

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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