The full picture which you can only really appreciate on the original vinyl.

Motörhead - Overkill



Motörhead's second album cover remains their finest to date. This exploding monsterhead, just absolutely awesome! The colours, the contrasts, the sheer beauty of destruction...it's just great!
The album itself is pretty lame for the most part, but who cares.

NEXT!

From the cover was a whole lot better than the record dept....








P.S. Which lead to three of the worst covers in homage/parody.

Arthur Blythe - Lenox Avenue Breakdown

Great progressive jazz! Not avant gard and not mainstream, either. One of Blythe's best. Anthony Davis, Cecil McBee (always a good sign), James Newton, James Blood Ulmer, Jack DeJohnette, Bob Stewart and Guillermo Franco all get down with Arthur's vision. If you like this album, you may want to check out Blythe's "Illusions" album, where he goes back and forth between a muscular acoustic band and a knife edged electric one.

The album artwork is by Mark Hess. A pleasant fantasy that shows Harlem as seen in a jazzer's mind's eye. Too cool.

NEXT !

Emmylou Harris - Luxury Liner (1977)

Country rock as good as it gets. A sonic beauty, too. What a voice and what a band.

The cover photo is achingly gorgeous. Love the lighting, but let's not get all analytical, let's just roll with the flow. If Emmylou had played her cards right, she could have had me!

NEXT !

Racer X - Street Lethal




A FANTASTIC album cover! I love racing! I love SciFi! I love big cities! And the logo is cool, too! That's about it for this album though.
In the 80s shredding was still somewhat new. Sure, Malmsteen's solo debut had already shaken up the scene, and hardcore fans knew already of Satriani and Vai.
This right here was a new level though. I've mentioned this band/album on the Purple Haze thread already. A shredding nightmare, except for maybe the last song. Paul Gilbert plays a ten second solo every 15 seconds, even though it's not an instrumental album. During the rest of the playtime the band tries to combine melodic metal with thrash, but the songs are quite boring.
When not shredding CDs and CD players along with the listeners to pieces, Paul Gilbert plays in Mister Big and on his solo albums, which mostly are 60s pop inspired. He also can be seen on various instructional shredding clips on YouTube.

EDIT: Damn I almost forgot to say NEXT!

I like The Audition's album cover art

I'm quite partial to the Roxy Music covers too. Especially the first two - Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure.

My favourite album cover, however, is this one.......

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/1077.jpg

I get a blank screen when I click on that...


What about this one?



John Mayall - Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton

Clapton says in his autobiography that he was bored at the photoshoot for this cover and so he went and bought the Beano from a shop nearby to hide behind. Typical of his "I'm so self-effacing - please don't call me God" period. It's a nice touch that has led some to refer to this as "the Beano album".

I think this is one of the best albums of his career: biting tone from his extremely loud Les Paul being the main appeal. Was he the first white boy who could really play the blues?

There were some good things in his work with Cream, but after the Layla album things went seriously downhill for him. Could have had something to do with his $1000-a-week smack habit, and his long-lasting tendency to drink everything in sight. A shame, because, as this album shows, he started out with real talent.