Formula 3 - Sognando e Risognando (1972)

I didn't know that cutting a woman in half could actually be made more creepy and disgusting, but these guys sure managed to figure it out. I guess they figured that if they made the body look like a bad blow-up doll of a corpse, they could get away with the whole bisection thing without it seeming too terrible. Of course, they failed to realize that even having that idea for an album cover in the first place is terrible in and of itself.

Ted Nugent - Love Grenade (2007)

You hear that, women with breast cancer? Ted Nugent says "Fuck you!"

Amazingly, this is actually less demeaning to women than the original, unused version of this album cover:

Velvett Fogg - Velvett Fogg (1969)

As much as I love bare breasts, and as much as I'm not opposed to the concept of the Summer of Love, this album cover manages to make both seem really unpalatable. Let's face it, any album cover that manages to make bare breasts seem like a terrible thing is committing some serious crimes against nature. And what's with the androgynous cowboy thing in the back? Or that ghostly guy? And what's with the feather boas? This cover is starting to make my head hurt. Curse you, 1960s!

Cannibal Corpse - Worm-Infested (2003)

While this might not really be the worst or most shocking album cover by Cannibal Corpse standards (mostly due to the lack of extreme amounts of gore), this one is still pretty damned bad in its own right. The gigantic amount of wormy tentacles trying to make their way into the girl's most special of places is already bad enough, but then there's the gigantic gaping maw of hell in the background that gives new meaning to the term "vagina dentata." Maybe this means I'm meant to psychoanalyze this, Freud style, to figure out just what the band's sexual hangups are that would result in them putting things like bloody raped corpses on most of their album covers, but most of me doesn't really want to know.

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!

Devourment - Molesting the Decapitated (1999)

Yep, it's a decapitated corpse alright. One that happens to be naked. You have to give the band a few points for making their album's title fairly accurate, and double bonus points for not having the nude corpse be female since I get pretty damned tired of misogyny on metal album covers. Of course, in the end we're still left with a naked, headless corpse, and it doesn't take much thought to realize that this isn't a good thing.

Scorpions - Virgin Killer (original cover) (1976)

This cover stands head and shoulders above any I've ever seen. It's in such bad taste as to render the cover difficult to even look at. It plays off of societal taboos in a way that's crass and exploitative in the worst possible sense. It features a naked preteen posing suggestively with a broken glass starburst over her genitals. My friends, this is Virgin Killer.

How does an album cover like this come about? Apparently, the band's record label asked for a shocking cover, and they sure as hell got one. They got one so bad that even the band themselves started to have second thoughts about what they had done. The fact that the cover got pulled and replaced with a generic group photo of the band suggests that the record label figured that out perhaps just a tad too late.

So congratulations to you, Scorpions. You somehow managed to make the worst album cover ever. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

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.

Incredible Hog - Incredible Hog (1973)

Boy there's nothing I like more than a female pig with several sets of human-like breasts, posing provocatively. I wonder if this album cover can be blamed for creating furries.

Mom's Apple Pie - Mom's Apple Pie (original cover) (1972)

This cover looks innocent enough at first, if extremely creepy, but sharp eyes will notice that the apple pie, aside from not looking anything at all like an apple pie, has a clearly defined labia/clitoris. Why the hell a pie would have either of those things is anybody's guess, but it makes me wonder if the people behind the American Pie movies knew about this album cover.

Cerrone - Cerrone's Paradise (1976)

My personal paradise also involves nude women giving themselves back problems on ancient appliances and wearing a dorky leisure suit while some mysterious white substance congeals on the floor! It's like Cerrone and I are cut from the same swarthy, hairy cloth!

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).

Scorpions - Lovedrive (original cover) (1979)

I have no idea how Scorpions managed to get the usually-reliable Hipgnosis to go along with this concept (or how they got them to go along with the cover to Animal Magnetism), but it should be obvious that this is pretty bad. The worst of it is that I don't even know what the point of this cover is. Maybe the moral of the cover is "if your hand is covered in bubblegum and you try to feel up a woman who just got out of the shower, you're in for rough sailing." Or maybe "if you're a swarthy Adam Corolla impersonator, your skin will have a 50% chance of chemically bonding with the flesh of bored, elderly brunettes." Or maybe "Scorpions should have never had a career in music, period."

Boxer - Below the Belt (1975)

Retarded Internet Catchphrases Made Literal #483: "punch her in the cunt"

Bloodhound Gang - Hefty Fine (2005)

Things we never needed to see on an album cover #547: a hairy, naked fat man hanging out inside a cardboard box

Jo Jo Gunne - The Asylum Recordings: Jumpin' the Gunne + So...Where's the Show? (2000)

Disaster struck the city of Tokyo today when it was again the victim of a giant monster attack. The creature, which appeared to be a giant, overweight, nude woman, seemed to believe that it was trying out for an avant-garde dance troupe and did so across much of the city, wiping out several city blocks and forcing the Japanese army to intervene. However, due to the creature's bulk, most conventional weapons proved useless, and it was only after Godzilla arrived from Monster Island to beat back the monster that the city again became peaceful. It is not known whether malice was truly intended by this creature as it danced its way across Tokyo, but Japan remains on high alert in case it returns.

Regurgitate - Carnivorous Erection (2000)

Much has been said of the ancient folkloric device of vagina dentata, wherein males may experience a form of castration anxiety from fear that penetration may result in the vagina becoming a toothed maw capable of the destruction of his very manhood. However, very little has been written about the converse of this condition experienced in females, penile dentata. Women who suffer from this fear have reported becoming afraid that, while performing fellatio on a male partner, the penis will spout a very poorly-designed, monstrous head from its shaft, and attempt to bite off the woman's tongue. Research into this field is still forthcoming.

Chumbawamba - Anarchy (1994)

For the approximately zero people in the US who care (myself included), apparently Chumbawamba were an anarchist punk rock group before they decided to poison our ears by singing nonstop about getting piss drunk in pubs and falling flat on your ass an awful lot. At this early stage in the game, Chumbawamba decided to merely assault our eyes by showing us a photo of a baby being born. A rather ugly, bloody, cheerless photo of a baby's head sticking out of it's mother's uterus, to be precise. It's supposed to be the miracle of birth and all that, but let's face it; it's a pretty ugly miracle.

Jim O'Rourke - Insignificance (2001)

There's nothing I'd like to see more than a fat, mustached, hairy-chested transvestite wearing bright pink stockings and a sheer tank top sitting in a chair looking depressed while holding the string to a weird toy duck. Actually, I misspoke. What I meant to say was I'd never like to see that at all, period.

Baby Bird - Fatherhood (1996)

Do you remember that dumb Arnold Schwartzenegger movie from the mid-90s in which Arnold somehow got man-pregnant? Did you ever say to yourself "Man, I wish that Arnold would've been played by some pale, bleached-blonde dimwit?" Then did you ever get the urge to see this pale, ghostlike, pregnant man strike a pose the likes of which you'd see on a horrible Celene Dion album cover with the added bonus of the man being nude?

If you said yes to the latter two, then I hold you responsible for this album cover and hate you forever.