A favorite of mine is Flash and the Pan, whose Lights in the Night album had a black wash over the cover of their first album so it was just barely visible. This was obvious on the original albums, but CDs could not reproduce the effect (though you can see it if you look carefully at the scratch).
A similar photo from this shoot was used for the cover of the “red album” (1962–1966).
They later arranged a photo shoot to recreate this image. It ended up later being used on the “blue album” (1967-1970).
It could have been a four-fer. The shoot was intended to be the cover for the Get Back album which instead was replaced by Let It Be which had a different cover.
In metal, Black Sabbath is not just a baseline but a benchmark. Their cover for Master Of Reality, arguably one of the worst album covers of all time, has been copied/parodied/satired/respected over the years by numerous other bands.
For instance:
Al Jourgenson and Paul Barker (both of Ministry, etc.) did a one-off project called 1000 Homo DJs that not only gave us one of the best Sabbath covers ever with their version of Sweet Leaf, they copied this cover art too for the 12" release.
Mister Bones was a Canadian stoner/doom band that released a couple of albums in the Oughts; their second long player, Monster Burn and the Power Seekers, used the MoR concept. They were a pretty good band but they changed their name to The Georgian Skull (terrible band name, btw) and then that band broke up 2 years later; check out Road Saw.
A rapper that goes by the name Blacastan copped the concept a couple of years ago, too, for his album The Master of Reality. Here’s a track from him, too: Crac-A-Stan which makes me laugh because that song has a sample from the era and even the genre, kinda, but it’s not Black Sabbath. Bonus points for anyone who recognizes it :D, but if you don’tIt’s the opening keyboard riff from Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
Prolly my favorite tho, is from a band called Church of Misery. They’re a doom band from Japan. For those who don’t know, doom metal is a genre that specifically cites Black Sabbath as the start of and the epitome of what it’s all about, both musically and lyrically. Church of Misery is a “theme” band tho, in that all their songs are about serial killers. And they basically copied/paid respect to/one-upped Sabbath with their cover for Master of Brutality. Here’s a track from them, too: Megalomania (Herbert Mullin).
I’d say the cover of Another Monty Python Album, but I think that the “real” album cover underneath is a hack*. At any rate, I can’t find it anywhere:
Too bad, in a way. The Pieter Brueghel painting would make a great Beethoven album sleeve.
*Especially because the “notes” on the back are clearly a joke.
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