Album Cover A Go-Go

Bat out of Hell



If there's one thing that I love, it's album cover art that would look equally at home airbrushed on the side of a hash dealer's van. Particularly if it takes the whole motorcycle-is-an-extension-of-the-penis thing and blows it up with an atom bomb called "Obvious." Plus it's got graveyards and demon bats and horse skulls and a central figure who's all muscle-y and handsome in a Conan (the Barbarian, not O'Brien) sort of way because you're CERTAINLY not going to put a picture of Meat Loaf on the front of an album you want people to actually buy. I mean, all due respect and love but... back then... he looked like the kind of guy who'd sweat pure fry-o-later grease were he ever to exercise, but that's an unlikely scenario seeing as how he doesn't like to be too far away from a deep, metal washtub full of pork rinds. Anyway, I also like that the sun is setting up in the corner there (or rising maybe, I don't know) because it really lends the whole picture a sense of drama that it would otherwise lack. Sometimes exploding bikes and driving-while-orgasming and Satan's cemetery just aren't enough. Sometimes you need mood lighting.

Look Sharp!

Ew, who wears white shoes? What are you, a college student being ironic? An ex-con attending church for the first time? A guy going to the prom in the ghetto? The personification of bad taste? Well whatever you happen to be, you might want to move to your left or your right; it appears that the 7:15 from Sacramento is bearing down on your coolsy-woolsy butt and unless you're looking to become a fashionable smear on the railroad tracks, somewhere else is where you should be. Try a nightclub that plays a lot of jazz fusion or a SoHo restaurant that only serves food beginning with the letter "Q." You've certainly got the shoes for both.

Hammer Smashed Face

Ha ha... excellent... yes, and what's even more hilarious is that this is one of the tamer album covers from our boys in Cannibal Corpse. Most of their other ones tread heavily through a disemboweling theme and each one individually is gorier and more disturbing than the entire Hellraiser series put together on a single VHS cassette and dunked in a bucket of slaughterhouse leavings. Too bad their music is just a bunch of grunts and guitar feedback and demon farts. Still though... for albums to leave lying around your bedroom to freak out your parents when you're fifteen, you can't do much better.

Rio

Talk about tapping into the gloriously tacky majesty of the 1980s... It's like Simon LeBon raided a Miami drug lord's mansion, grabbed some art from off the bathroom wall, and said, "here let's just use this after we blow some rails off it's surface." Truly, it speaks to a long love affair with mountainous landscapes of cocaine. Fact: If you stare at the "Rio" album cover in a candle-lit bathroom while chanting "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, BLOODY MARY," the lady on the cover with suddenly appear and try to talk to you about Miami Vice and why you should buy her a Lamborghini. And then she'll try to sell you a a Swatch watch. Or maybe an Apple computer. Or... um... some other 80s references... Alf... Koosh balls... New Coke... Savings and Loan scandals... St. Elmo's Fire... yeah, any of those.

Love Gun

Who do KISS think they are? Seriously... there's taking pride in your accomplishments and then there's commissioning an artist to draw the opening scene of all your masturbation fantasies so you can put it on an album named after what you pay strippers to call your dick. Gene Simmons is gross cubed times every venereal disease known to modern biology.