The Cover Uncovered: What on earth is on the cover of Lard’s debut EP?
Plastered on Lard’s 1989 EP is the grotesque profile of a creature plucked from the darkest depths of HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror: a worm-like monster with a slavering maw of a face radiating parasitic menace and invasive hostility.
It’s an image that seizes the imagination with an affronting, alien aggression, making it hard to think of any other record cover in popular music that glares with such unearthed, primal threat.
In the late 1980s, Chicago’s Trax Studios was the ground zero of a serious creative purple patch between Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker. As well as unleashing their seminal conjurings on the industrial metal world, the pair were roping Minor Threat frontman for Pailhead, collaborating with Cabaret Voltaire for Acid Horse’s caustic grooves, and mayhem was eagerly indulged in with Revolting Cocks’ psychoactive debauchery, whose tours nearly eclipsed Ministry’s live infamy by the decade’s close.
One of the most substantial and long-lasting of Jourgensen and Barker’s myriad side-projects was Lard. Centring on the Ministry duo, drummer and 1000 Homo DJs cop from ‘Hey Asshole’, Jeff Ward, and Dead Kennedys frontman, Jello Biafra—credited as Count Ringworm—the Hypo Luxa & Hermes Pan production pair would twist Biafra’s volatile vocal attack and stinging lyrical surrealism with their trademark sonic heft, beefing up the hardcore punk assault with a mechanised chug of buzzing guitar attack and warped media samples.
The Power of Lard debut EP was as good an introduction as any. Boasting the thunderous title track, the skulking ‘Hellfudge’ and ‘Time to Melt’s’ half-hour sludge metal mulch, the nascent Lard served as another vital capture of Jourgensen and Barker’s industrial bruise and Biafra’s dripping subversion. It featured some of his most colourfully demented lines he’d ever wrestled from his scabrous world reportage—”…a fat preacher sits and beats off in front of you…”, “Ever hear about the guy in New York, whose dick fell off in the bath after he shot it full of coke?”
Such squalid pot shots deserved a befittingly putrid EP cover. Under Biafra’s conceptual direction, Leeds artist and routine Alternative Tentacles designer John Yates was tasked with “cut, paste, and pseudo-mechanics” duties, assembling Biafra’s sourced images and realising his strange visions.
“I would typically choose typography, size elements, etc, then go back to Biafra with a rough layout,” Yates recalled, “He’d generally tweak things to his liking, and after a few rounds, we’d have a final layout.”
He added: “Same goes for the insert and label. Alternative Tentacles’ mail order artist-in-residence at the time, Jason Traeger, was responsible for the hand holding the can of lard illustration. I think he sketched it out in maybe 10–15 minutes. He was an extremely talented artist who just happened to be working mail order.”
Having retrieved the images from an old science academia book, Biafra lifted the striking profile of a lamprey fish for The Power of Lard’s unsettling artwork. A four-eyed, jawless carnivore resembling an eel, it’s found in numerous rivers and coasts around the world. The lamprey looks harmless enough from the side, yet viewed face-on, it becomes a disturbing pit of funnelled teeth used to bore and suck the flesh off hapless fish and occasional marine animals, frequently found with blood and viscera coating its tube-like cavity of death.
It’s hard to decipher any particular buried meaning, but who cares when Yates and Biafra have rustled up an EP cover so captivatingly horrid. Lard would persist into the 2000s, with rumours abound about a new record off the back of Barker and Jourgensen’s recent studio partnership for Ministry’s awaited 17th LP. Additionally, Yates would found the Stealworks design agency, but none involved with the Alternative Tentacles team or beyond ever managed to conjure a cover so queasy, visceral, and thrillingly abominable as The Power of Lard’s gloriously fetid EP cover.
