Metal bands are funny beasts. Many of them go on about how they listen to all sorts of music, yet when you question them about this it turns out that they just listen to all type of metal. Boring. The good thing about a lots of them is that they include random non-metal/non-heavy tracks on their albums from time to time.
This one is from Swedish death metal pioneers At The Gates and is taken from their seminal Slaughter Of The Soul album. If I had to pick then this record would definitely make an appearance in my top 5 records of all time and is almost perfect from start (and what a start it is!) to finish.
Scorpions are no stranger to the crap metal cover, in fact they’ve made some of the weirdest and most offensive ones out there but they’ve been discussed at length on other sites already.
So, let’s set the scene here. This was the German bands’s second album. One that moved them further in the direction of all out ballsy, manly heavy metal music and away from their jazzy roots. I think the cover works perfectly. To my surprise the band to this day still feel that it missed the mark slightly.
The music world is full of crap artwork but there’s certainly one genre that really seems to excel in it and that’s heavy metal. I love metal and to make up for the fact that I’ll rarely post up any tunes here for people to check out then I thought it might be fun to have a look at some of the more interesting metal artwork I’ve come across in the past.
On to our first…
Now, I have no idea what the concept behind this even was. For starters there’s not much metal about it at all. It actually reminds me more of the cartoons from One Crazy Summer a film that I, for some unknown reason, have seen more than once and you’re lucky to have never heard of (I hope). It did have the guy from Police Academy with the funny voice in it, which perhaps makes it almost worth watching.
Anyway, I digress. This cover is truly awful. Wikipedia tells me “[the album] was interpreted as an attempt to conquer the American and Japanese markets, where glam and pop metal acts dominated the charts, but to no avail.”
