Loading ...
Christmas albums always bring out the laziest in designers, and sure enough this cover’s combo of drawing, color scheme, layout, and font is ugly as sin. Visually it has little to do with Metallica, if slightly more to do with Christmas. (Is Santa’s suit blue because he’s really evil Rock Santa?) But it’s so goofy looking that the damn thing is actually kinda likeable. Sadly there’s no “fugly album cover (that makes us kind of happy) of the year” race. Maybe next year?
Having way too much time on my hands, I decided to investigate exactly what constitutes a “Christmas version” of a Mettalica hit. Evidently, you suck all the life out of the song (not required for Nothing Else Matters), and then add jingle bells.
[vitaminrecords.com]
This is a mixed bag for me — I love the color scheme, but it’s the drawing that’s lazy, really sub-Rankin-Bass.
i actually like everything about this one except for the drawing… replace Santa with a caricature of Lars Ulrich wearing an elfin cap and i’d nominate this for BEST album cover of the year.
Mock the fugly cover all you want, 20-30 years from now that CD will be worth $200 to “esoterica” collectors.
@dennisobell: @dippinkind: Agreed. Lazy.
Perhaps this will lead to a new Idolator contest: Photoshop / “remix” your favorite band’s covers, like In Rainbows!
I’m gonna start a label right now and publish only weird cover albums of Metallica and Radiohead. I reckon there’s a market out there for that stuff.
It’s blue because that way they only have to pay for two colors: blue and black, rather than full-color, which probably costs more down at the disc manufacturers. Although I guess that doesn’t answer the question of why it’s not red…