[ExTeaSea]

Random albums you got because of the album cover? When a local store was going out of business years ago everything was quite cheap so I grabbed stuff I never heard of before based on the cover haha.

[MadhattanJack]

I don't know about "random," but XTC's Go 2 is my favorite album ever, it has been since I bought it in 1979, and I bought it almost entirely because of the album cover. I don't know if it's still my favorite album because of the cover, but I guess it doesn't hurt...?

Then there was Roxy Music: By the time I got into them, their first five albums were already out, so I had to pick which one to buy first, and I picked Stranded even though the cover for Country Life was more sexually explicit. Stranded just has a better cover, if you ask me. Also, I might have bought Pink Floyd's Animals just because of the cover, since I was mostly into punk/new wave by then, but eventually I would have bought it anyway. (Probably.)

Aside from that, I bought the Cocteau Twins' Head Over Heels mostly because I liked the cover, and after that I probably bought several albums on the 4AD label because they were making the best album covers in the world at the time. (Specifically, Vaughn Oliver was making them.) And going back to the 70s, I probably even bought ELP's Brain Salad Surgery and Alice Cooper's School's Out because of their (die-cut) covers, since I never really liked ELP or Alice Cooper all that much... But I wouldn't call any of those "random."

There are also a few vinyl LPs in my collection that I bought because the covers looked like they'd be "limited editions" and since I might eventually buy them anyway, better to get them with the fancy-version covers — for example, OMD's debut LP with the die-cut cover, and the Stranglers' The Raven (with the lenticular print). I probably wouldn't have bought the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request if I hadn't found a reasonably-priced copy with the lenticular print. (I just happen to like lenticular prints.)

Then again, I might not have bought Led Zeppelin III if I had known they would keep printing it with the fancy rotating-wheel cover. I thought they'd only print a few thousand that way and they'd be worth Big Bucks later on, but no! Of course, the problem with Led Zeppelin III is that the metal hub of the rotating wheel digs into the cover of the album sitting to the immediate right of it on the shelf, which is usually Led Zeppelin IV. I ended up liking the album anyway, but I think this may have been why I didn't buy the limited-edition fancy-cover versions of PIL's Metal Box or the Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues, which actually did end up being worth Big Bucks (at least for a while, anyway).

More recently, I bought the corrected-polarity version of XTC's Skylarking mostly because of the revised (actually the original version) cover — I would have bought that anyway too, but I wasn't all that put out by the original uncorrected polarity. I might have also bought the Sun's Signature EP (a recent Elizabeth Fraser project, so it's Cocteau Twins-related) because of the cover, but mostly that was because the shop had some left over from Record Store Day and they'd reduced the price on it. That particular cover probably turns most people off (perhaps that's why they weren't selling), but for some reason I'm fascinated by that image.

[Repo]

I really need to get into XTC. I've always dug their singles. Will give Go another go.


Go 2 by XTC

[Johnnyo]

I had heard of but had never heard Ohio Players

Saw this cover


Pleasure by Ohio Players

which I thought was very cool, bought the album, really liked it and bought more Ohio players albums. So I guess the cover got me into the band