The Beatles - Yesterday and Today (original cover) (1966)

Let's ignore the whole "GREATEST BAND EVER" critical fawning that takes place whenever the Beatles are mentioned for a second and be reasonable here; this cover is fucking awful.

I can't really imagine how an idea this asinine was concocted in the first place. "Let's drape meat and plastic body parts on the Beatles!" sounds like a bad joke, not an actual art project. Even then, using one of said images for an album cover is not only asinine but a huge lapse in judgement. Everyone's favorite mop-topped whatevers covered in meat is not something your average pop fan wants to consider.

Some people consider this album cover to be a brilliant ploy by the Beatles to stick it to the man and make some sort of bold artistic statement. An artistic statement involving meat, I guess. I agree more with George Harrison's take on this whole thing; "I thought it was gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them."

Butthole Surfers - Electriclarryland (1996)

I can't really nail this album cover for being in bad taste since a solid majority of the Butthole Surfers's album covers were in bad taste. I can at least take them to dask for doing bad taste so ineptly. I mean, this is a band that went from album covers featuring photos of starving Africans and John Wayne Gacy paintings to a very crudely drawn cartoon image of a guy getting a pencil shoved into his ear. This doesn't make the previously mentioned covers that much better, mind, it just makes you realize that if you're going to really go for bad taste, you might as well go all the way. It won't make your album cover any better, but it won't look so half-assed.

Cattle Decapitation - Human Jerky (1999)

If you're trying to be shocking with an album cover (and if you're a grindcore act, you're almost certainly trying to be shocking), it might help to use a little less contrast on your photo. It seriously took me about 10 minutes for me to figure out that what I was looking at wasn't an unidentifiable blur of red and black but was actually a decapitated cattle head (GEE, JUST LIKE THE BAND NAME). Boy was my face red!

Did you know that the members of this band are apparently vegetarians and place a huge emphasis on animal rights? After seeing this cover, they sure could've fooled me!

XXX Maniak - Harvesting the Cunt Nectar (2004)

You know, I don't usually expect much from grindcore and its variants when it comes to album covers. They're gory, stupid, and attempt to shock the viewer with whatever means necessary. This, however, seems pretty low even for the genre. I mean, come on, gouging out a woman's vaginal area with a shovel? The random sexual organs just scattered around in the frame for who-knows-what reason? Even the name feels kind of forced in its "outrageousness." And metal fans wonder why they're often considered socially-maladjusted deviants.

Cattle Decapitation - Humanure (2004)

Cattle Decapitation attempt to take a page from the Cannibal Corpse school of "ultra gory 'shocking' album covers that try a bit too hard to be shocking" and end up with something that's honestly kind of ridiculous. It's gross, yes, but you mean to tell me that this cow presumably ate a few humans alive then, due to the cow's digestive system not being intended for breaking down meat, shat them out in a gory heap? Come on, people, you have to work a bit harder to outdo Cannibal Corpse here (not that I'm asking anybody to try, for the love of God).

Deerhoof - Milk Man (2004)

Having listened to this album, given that I actually own it, I can reveal that the its cover isn't quite as random as it seems. It actually fits in with the "concept" of the album a little bit, with the character on the cover being the masked, Pied-Piperish milk man. Yet even backed with this knowledge, at the end of the day you're left staring at a creepy as fuck image of a naked, masked man who's been stabbed with giant fruit. It could've been worse, I suppose; he could've been drawn anatomically correct.

Anthrax - Fistful of Metal (1984)

Not to be outdone by Pantera, Anthrax decided to jump into the fray and add their little contribution to the "most poorly drawn metal album cover ever" contest. Apparently, the power of METAL is so strong that it completely destroys several basic concepts of human anatomy while it destroys your face. What angle is that fist coming from? Why isn't it bloody? Why is the tongue bizarrely off to one side when it should either not be in view or up front?

The best part is, even as his face is being shattered from behind, the guy still has a very serious expression on his face. It may destroy your face and it may put you on horrible album covers, but let it be known that metal is serious fuckin' business.

Bloodrock - Bloodrock U.S.A. (1972)

For the longest time, I assumed that this album cover was depicting a green orc creature standing just off-camera and simply driving his finger through the skull of Perfectly Two-Dimensional Man, which didn't make a lot of sense to me. Then I realized that the orc's fist is acting as a GUN and he's actually firing a bullet through our flat hero's poor cranial cavity. Does this make me feel stupid, being bested by an album cover? Not really, because it's drawn so shittily that they couldn't even convey what they were trying to get across correctly. If anything, it doesn't answer WHY we should care that the guy is getting his brains blown out in the first place. Maybe it's because of his hideous fashion sense, but I get the sinking feeling that's not it.

Cannibal Corpse - Tomb of the Mutilated (1992)

I will be fair; prettymuch every Cannibal Corpse album cover is like this. They're clearly going for some sort of aesthetic that involves horribly bloody and mutilated corpses and they stick to it. That still doesn't make them any good, but you have to give them credit for trying at least.

At any rate, even as far as Cannibal Corpse album covers go, this is one of their worst. Aside from the extreme amount of blood, gore, and bile that's splattered all over the proceedings like fake blood in an early Peter Jackson film, we have what appears to be one mostly disemboweled corpse giving oral sex to another mostly disemboweled female corpse. Is it necrophilia when the both partners are presumably dead? And why in the hell should I even wonder about this?

A.A. Allen - Healer of Broken Hearts

When talking about broken hearts, the last thing in the world I expect is literalism. That goes double for the almost anti-literal Christian music scene. So my first though is that this is a parody of some sort, but none of the song titles seem like what you'd find on a parody record. My other thought is that this is just a bit of dark humor on the behalf of A.A. Allen but then I remember that the Christian music scene thinks that releasing album covers featuring people like the Handless Organist and Jeff is actually a good idea.

If nothing else, that's possibly the weakest blood stain in the history of blood stains. Unless we're to learn that not only is his heart broken, he's also anemic, which seems sadly plausible.

Andrew W.K. - I Get Wet (2001)

As hard as I've tried, I haven't been able to come up with anything that's funnier than the actual story of how this album cover came about. Here's the deal: in order to get this shot, our pal Andrew decided to nail himself in the nose with a cinder block for realism's sake. Then, after discovering that his own nosebleed wasn't bloody enough, he decided to just smear pig's blood on his face. Congratulations, Andrew: you're possibly one of the stupidest men who's ever lived.