What the Hell, Crystal Viper?

Sheesh. Poland’s Crystal Viper are really on a downward slide, huh? Not so much with regards to their music, because really who cares about music?, ugh!, but with regards to something really super-duper important: their album art. It seems like not that long ago, the band was using their covers as an opportunity to take the very concept of metal to stunning new levels of metallicity: for example, it wasn’t enough for them to have a dude with a scythe sitting atop a horse, which would already be pretty metal — it had to be a werewolf with a scythe sitting atop a horse, the animal itself haunched on its hind legs, all portrayed from a worm’s eye view for maximum epicness and powertude.

But then last year they released Crimen Excepta (Latin for “coffee without cream”), and it’s album art was only typically metal, not extraordinarily metal. And now they’ve released the album art for their latest offering, Possession, and it could pretty much be your run-of-the mill cover for any number of albums in any number of other genres.

I mean, look at the stuff werewolf sitting on her pillow. It’s almost… cute. Yuck. So not okay, dudes.

What remains a mystery is why Crystal Viper have suddenly lost their flair for the visually excessive. I’m guessing it may have something to do with the fact that they apparently release a new album every roughly every seven weeks. It’s hard to think of new ways to make something bad-assed even worse-assed, y’know?