Strange Album Covers Pt. 2: The Bloodier the Better

In today's installment of Strange Album Covers, we are going to look at some truly grotesque covers.

Up first is Impaled on their album "The Last Gasp". Impaled has been mentioned before as being one of many bands featuring members that are also in Ghoul. Impaled plays a form of death/grind. I could be wrong, but I don't think that the person on the cover is gasping. Impaled said they used sausages to represent the internal organs that this person apparently had ripped out through their mouth or puked up. Very tasty.

Bleeding Through is not well-received in most metal circles due to their metalcore leanings, but this album cover is fucking brutal. I happen to like this album, the band blends metalcore with blackened death metal and some interesting keyboard parts. I haven't like much of the rest of their stuff though. I bought this when I worked at Target and my boss happened to see it. The next day he told me he had nightmares about it. Apparently this fellow has had his lower jaw ripped off. Tough to eat when that happens. This again is fake, it is done through CGI.

We come now to the band Blood Red Throne and their album "Affiliated with the Suffering". Blood Red Throne is a decent death metal outfit from Norway. This cover features some maniac standing over a pool of blood in the snow with a bit of a shit-eating grin on his face. I would not want to meet this gentleman, particularly not in the snow.

We come next to Autopsy, one of the first bigger death metal bands and their classic album "Severed Survival". This album had two covers. The one on the right was deemed too bloody for many stores to carry and seems to feature an individual getting the Hellraiser treatment, i.e. being torn apart by chains. The one on the left is potentially creepier as we get a patient's eye view of some maniacal doctors that are committing acts of unnecessary and painful surgery. I actually prefer the censored version better, which is weird.

Last, but not least, no bloody album covers exhibit would be complete without SOMETHING from the great Cannibal Corpse. This one is disturbing on many levels. I will leave it at that and not comment further. Wow.

Impaled vs. Ghoul

Okay, these two bands are basically the same band. Ghoul is currently made up of two current members of Impaled, both of whom were also in Exhumed, and one of it's former members was also in Impaled. So at one time, three of the members of Impaled were in Ghoul.

It is common knowledge that Ghoul is not exactly a serious project, see the photos for proof of that. They wear sacks over their heads and are covered in fake blood. They go by names like Cremator (Ross Sewage of Impaled), Digestor (Sean McGrath of Impaled), Dissector, and Fermentor. The band even has its own origin story, which is interesting and long and will not be repeated here. The albums tell the story of the band and their wild and weird adventures in "Creepsylvania".

The issue though is the fact that the two bands basically sound the same. This was not always the case as Ghoul played a form of crossover thrash/grind and Impaled was essentially just a death grind band, but over the years Impaled has been becoming thrashier. At this point, the two bands are basically interchangeable except for the lyrical themes.

I have no problems with band members forming side projects. Hell, if it weren't for side projects, we wouldn't have bands like Down (formed by members of Pantera, Corrosion of Conformity, Eyehategod, and Crowbar), Bloodbath (formed by members of Katatonia, Opeth, Hypocrisy, Witchery, and Edge of Sanity), and Destroyer 666 (formed by KK Warslut of Bestial Warlust). I do have an issue though when more than one member of a band form another band which basically either starts out sounding the same as the main band, or through its influence steers the original band into sounding like the side project.

If there are going to be two bands made up of the same members, they should sound like two different bands. End of rant.