The Perils of Terrible Art Direction

I don't know if today is precisely a day that will live in infamy, but it's a day.
I've got a post.
That's something at least.

 Next Week (1987)

Today's lesson in graphic design is brought to you by Hypnolovewheel. A band whose bio is so nonspecific as to simply place their origin as "Long Island". They are usually described in terms of being some sort of hidden secret cult indie pop band. I read it on more than one page looking stuff up. But I also think that to a certain extent there's some snake eating its own tail to what little there is about them on the interwebs.

They released records for at the very least a half a dozen years including five full length Lps and a handful of singles on various labels including the Alias Records which was a pretty big deal for an indie label back in the day. But they never quite took off. I mean, I like them. They were a good enough band. What went wrong?

A quick glance at the eye bleeding cover for their first single here should be a clue.
Follow that up with a look at their next single...

Wow (1991)

Wow, indeed. I mean, if you weren't a complete nutcase like me, would you even take a second glance at a record with that kind of terrible artwork?
It goes way beyond the terrible "My girlfriend is an artist and she drew a cover" kind of bad cover art that we've seen on here before and into the "somebody with a modicum of actual talent conceived and drew this stuff and the band and label looked at it and thought, "Yeah, this will really sell this record"  (the artist for this one is Lance Laurie and he does some really cool stuff and did do some other good record covers too. This one however...)

It's some good indie pop, but I'd be hard pressed to grab either of these out of the bin without having listened to it first. Unfortunately for them it's a trend that followed them throughout their brief existence...

There's even a video for this particular single that's kind of interesting.