Alice Cooper is again! The shock basic rock music extravaganza that introduced us “I’m Eighteen,” “College’s Out,” and “No Extra Mister Good Man” has introduced The Revenge of Alice Cooper. Arriving on July twenty fifth, The Revenge of Alice Cooper is the primary album from Alice Cooper in additional than 50 years. At this level, you could be asking, wait a minute, hasn’t Alice Cooper been recording, touring, and performing all alongside?
Sure and no. Alice Cooper, the person, has had an extended and in depth profession, releasing albums like Welcome To My Nightmare, Constrictor, Trash, and 2023’s Street. Alice Cooper, the band, went its separate methods within the early 70s. Now, Cooper has reunited with guitarist Michael Bruce, drummer Neal Smith and bassist Dennis Dunaway for The Revenge of Alice Cooper. The album additionally guarantees a particular posthumous look by authentic guitarist Glen Buxton, who died in 1997.
The Alice Cooper group solely existed for a handful of years, rising from a Phoenix, Arizona-area highschool band known as The Spiders. Adopting the Alice Cooper moniker in 1968, the group lasted till 1974, and by the top, everybody was burnt out on medication, touring, and a rollercoaster of fame. “In my eyes, the Alice Cooper band by no means broke up,” wrote Cooper in his memoir, Alice Cooper, Golf Monster. “There wasn’t any yelling. No one accused anybody of something or pointed fingers.”
As an alternative, everybody went their very own manner and didn’t get again collectively – till now. With The Revenge of Alice Cooper on its manner, it’s time to revisit the basic Alice Cooper albums – and discover out that are billion-dollar infants, and which ought to be let loose with the remainder of faculty.
7
Straightforward Motion
Alice Cooper Nonetheless Attempting To Determine Out Who They Are
Alice Cooper’s second album isn’t dangerous, per se. It’s only a transitional second when the band was nonetheless discovering its footing. It opens with a fuzzed-out saloon cabaret quantity (“Mr. and Misdemeanor”) earlier than segueing to a beautiful, carefree, sun-kissed tune that’s laden with drug innuendo (“Shoe Salesman”). From there, we’ve got an avant-garde cacophony that in some way works in a line from West Facet Story (“Nonetheless No Air”). That is simply the primary third of the album. It is quite a bit.
Straightforward Motion is a captivating time capsule, again to a time in America when you would scare the overall inhabitants by being too bizarre. The album is barely incohesive, with songs and parts from their pre-Alice Cooper days, after they performed because the Nazz (not the Todd Rundgren band). You may inform that the band is virtually there on Straightforward Motion. They had been lacking one thing.
The album is barely incohesive, with songs and parts from their pre-Alice Cooper days, after they performed because the Nazz (not the Todd Rundgren band).
Within the 5 a long time for the reason that authentic Alice Cooper group went its separate methods, Cooper himself has change into (rightfully) related to shock rock and horror. Alice Cooper, nevertheless, all the time had an odd cabaret ingredient to it, to the purpose that it’s odd that there hasn’t been an Alice Cooper Broadway musical but.
6
Muscle Of Love
A Band On Its Final Legs (For Now)
When Alice Cooper sat down to begin writing and recording Muscle of Love, the group began “to get an increasing number of severe concerning the materials,” in response to Cooper’s Golf Monster. He wrote how the music grew to become “an increasing number of slick and business,” and extra “deliberate” in its sound. “The songs grew to become much less reckless and fewer ingenious. There have been numerous compositions the place I mainly felt like I used to be going, ‘Okay, in case you guys actually prefer it that manner.’”
There’s a lacquer to the album that retains it from hitting more durable. “Large Apple Dreamin’ (Hippo)” opens with Bob Dolin enjoying a Deep Purple-esque organ riff. It’s very proto-metal, a sound they revisit on the title monitor. However the lead single, “Teenage Lament ’74,” comes off much less black leather-based and extra brown fringe suede jacket. Having Ronnie Spector, Liza Minnelli, and the Pointer Sisters singing backup on the monitor didn’t assist.
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There are some good songs on Muscle of Love, however the band was flaming out at that time. Their edges had been blunted and, properly… there’s a purpose why this was the final album the Alice Cooper band put out earlier than they went their separate methods.
“There was amongst us in these periods an absence of enthusiasm for pushing the Alice Cooper character as we all the time had,” wrote Dennis Dunaway in his e-book, Snakes! Guillotines! Electrical Chairs! My Adventures within the Alice Cooper Group. “You couldn’t hear it within the music. And also you didn’t sense it in our camaraderie, but it surely was lurking in our collective intestine.”
5
Pretties For You
Wait, This Is Alice Cooper? The place’s The Scary Rock?
Launched on Frank Zappa’s label, Straight Data, Pretties For You is in contrast to another Alice Cooper album, be it your entire band or any entry within the solo musician’s prolonged discography. Leaning closely into psychedelic rock and experimentation, which was the band’s forte on the time, Pretties For You is weird… in all the nice methods. The primary simple rock music (“Dwelling”) comes 5 tracks in.
There are some echoes of The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s was launched the 12 months prior, and the White Album would come out 5 months after Pretties For You). There’s additionally numerous Zappa in it; he produced the album (alongside Ian Underwood) and his presence might be felt in a few of the weirder moments.
In comparison with the remainder of the albums, Pretties For You is not probably the most Alice Cooper of Alice Cooper albums, however there’s some attraction to it. It reveals the place Alice Cooper – band and performer – was earlier than all of the snakes and guillotines. It additionally has some diamonds within the tough: the one, “Mirrored,” would later be repackaged as “Elected” for Billion Greenback Infants.
4
College’s Out
Alice Cooper’s Largest Hit, However Is It Their Greatest Album?
Sure, this appears sacrilegious. “College’s Out” is Alice Cooper’s largest hit. It reached No. 7 on the Scorching 100. It established them because the band for rebels and delinquents within the ‘70s, exhibiting off a punk angle earlier than there was punk. College’s Out, nevertheless, is simply advantageous.
It simply suffers from what occurs to many bands: reverse engineering an LP after having successful. “We needed to write an album of songs that linked with ‘College’s Out,’” Cooper advised AZCentral. “They needed to level in direction of faculty or in direction of that period of your life. I simply went again to the fact of my very own faculty.”
It simply suffers from what occurs to many bands: reverse engineering an LP after having successful.
Recorded whereas touring for Killer, and it got here out lower than 9 months after Love It To Dying. It’s a loosely-connected idea album, kicking off with “College’s Out” and ending with the bittersweet “Alma Mater.” There are dalliances with Broadway (“Gutter Cat vs. The Jets”), jazzy bar-blues (“Blue Turk”), and theatrical rock (“My Stars”). It isn’t dangerous; it simply feels a bit scattershot.
However the album did what it wanted to. Alice Cooper’s longtime supervisor, Shep Gordon, stated Killer “form of obtained us prepared” for fulfillment, whereas College’s Out was “the breakthrough, musically and identity-wise. We actually took over.”
3
Killer
Alice Cooper Exhibits They Actually Can Play
The second of two albums that Alice Cooper launched in 1971, Killer cemented the visible ingredient of each Cooper and the Alice Cooper band, with drummer Neal Smith’s pet snake Kachina on the duvet. The album, thought of by many to be the band’s finest pure rock report, kicks off with the humor rocker “Beneath My Wheels” (which stays a staple of Alice’s solo reveals). It concludes with “Useless Infants,” an anti-child abuse music, and the theatrical title monitor, which ends with what sounds just like the titular killer being subjected to an electrical chair.
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There aren’t many genres of music that gained reputation after the Nineteen Sixties and 70s that weren’t immediately influenced by the rock music of that point.
The album additionally has the prog-rock influenced “Halo of Flies,” an eight-minute monitor that was composed to quiet critics who thought the band couldn’t play. “Lots of them appeared satisfied that our theatrics had been only a crutch to smokescreen our deficiencies,” Dennis Dunaway advised Outsider Rock.
“So, years later, having a bunch of extraneous riffs and melodies kicking round, we determined to use our knack for segues, and we got here up with ‘Halo of Flies.’ It was the primary time many critics lastly admitted that we might play. And it proved that the band was self-sufficient in writing their very own advanced preparations.”
2
Love It To Dying
The True First Alice Cooper Album
With out Love It To Dying, there could be no Alice Cooper as we speak – each band and individual. After two flop albums, the band lastly discovered itself after connecting with Bob Ezrin. Ezrin labored with the band, serving to them lower a few of the extra discovered on Pretties For You and Straightforward Motion. When introduced with a bluesy rock “epic,” Ezrin “whittled [it] down, dissecting every little half to ensure every thing labored and was tight,” in response to Dunaway. That “epic” grew to become a sub-three-minute rocker now often called “I’m Eighteen.”
“I’m Eighteen” is Alice Cooper’s massive breakthrough hit, reaching No. 21 on the Billboard Scorching 100. The one’s success lifted Love It To Dying to No. 21 on the Billboard 200, however the album is greater than only one hit. The band embellished its spooky, bluesy improvisation on “Black Juju,” enhancing their harmful, darkish picture (which they continued to pursue in “Is It My Physique” and “Hallowed Be My Title”).
Love It To Dying technically closes with a canopy of Rolf Harris’s “Solar Come up,” the songwriter behind the novelty hit “Tie Me Kangaroo Down.” In 2014, Harris was convicted of sexually assaulting 4 underage ladies. He died in 2023 at age 93 as a consequence of neck most cancers.
The closing songs of “Second Coming” and “Ballad of Dwight Fry” paint a terrifying, paranoid image, hinting on the terror Cooper would develop on Welcome To My Nightmare. In the end, Love It To Dying is a whole picture, a cohesive expertise from begin to end. Cooper considers it the primary actual Alice Cooper album, and it’s laborious to not disagree.
1
Billion Greenback Infants
Alice Cooper At Its Greatest
If Love It To Dying was spiritually the primary actual Alice Cooper album, then Billion Greenback Infants was spiritually the final. Although technically the penultimate launch earlier than Alice Cooper’s members scattered, it’s obtained the pomp and circumstance of the grand finale. The album opens with a bombastic model of “Howdy Hooray,” first recorded by Judy Collins. It looks like we’re on the climax of a incredible present, the curtains drawing for the ultimate act.
The album completely encapsulated Alice Cooper: the cabaret theatrics, the darkish humor, and the musicianship. Alice Cooper adopted the roles of self-deprecating jokesters. The title monitor is a self-depreciating jab, the band “making complete enjoyable of ourselves,” says Alice in Golf Monster. “We had been laughing at our viewers and at ourselves and on the circus spectacle and absurdity of our success.” Including to the absurdity, psych-folk peacenik Donovan sings on “Billion Greenback Infants.”
The album completely encapsulated Alice Cooper: the cabaret theatrics, the darkish humor, and the musicianship.
The camp in “Unfinished Candy” is paired with the sincerity of “Technology Landslide.” The laborious rock fringe of “No Extra Mr. Good Man” and “Elected” is balanced by the candy “Mary Ann.” One thing about Billion Greenback Infants clicks, and it’s profitable from the album’s begin to its closing monitor, the spookshow climax, “I Love the Useless.”
Although Billion Greenback Infants didn’t spawn a single that surpassed College’s Out’s success, it’s Alice Cooper’s business peak, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart (a feat Cooper himself wouldn’t replicate). And sadly, the success of the album fueled the band’s deterioration. Although they’d launch Muscle of Love, this album marks the (short-term finish) of Alice Cooper – however what a approach to exit.
Alice Cooper is again! The shock basic rock music extravaganza that introduced us “I’m Eighteen,” “College’s Out,” and “No Extra Mister Good Man” has introduced The Revenge of Alice Cooper. Arriving on July twenty fifth, The Revenge of Alice Cooper is the primary album from Alice Cooper in additional than 50 years. At this level, you could be asking, wait a minute, hasn’t Alice Cooper been recording, touring, and performing all alongside?
Sure and no. Alice Cooper, the person, has had an extended and in depth profession, releasing albums like Welcome To My Nightmare, Constrictor, Trash, and 2023’s Street. Alice Cooper, the band, went its separate methods within the early 70s. Now, Cooper has reunited with guitarist Michael Bruce, drummer Neal Smith and bassist Dennis Dunaway for The Revenge of Alice Cooper. The album additionally guarantees a particular posthumous look by authentic guitarist Glen Buxton, who died in 1997.
The Alice Cooper group solely existed for a handful of years, rising from a Phoenix, Arizona-area highschool band known as The Spiders. Adopting the Alice Cooper moniker in 1968, the group lasted till 1974, and by the top, everybody was burnt out on medication, touring, and a rollercoaster of fame. “In my eyes, the Alice Cooper band by no means broke up,” wrote Cooper in his memoir, Alice Cooper, Golf Monster. “There wasn’t any yelling. No one accused anybody of something or pointed fingers.”
As an alternative, everybody went their very own manner and didn’t get again collectively – till now. With The Revenge of Alice Cooper on its manner, it’s time to revisit the basic Alice Cooper albums – and discover out that are billion-dollar infants, and which ought to be let loose with the remainder of faculty.
7
Straightforward Motion
Alice Cooper Nonetheless Attempting To Determine Out Who They Are
Alice Cooper’s second album isn’t dangerous, per se. It’s only a transitional second when the band was nonetheless discovering its footing. It opens with a fuzzed-out saloon cabaret quantity (“Mr. and Misdemeanor”) earlier than segueing to a beautiful, carefree, sun-kissed tune that’s laden with drug innuendo (“Shoe Salesman”). From there, we’ve got an avant-garde cacophony that in some way works in a line from West Facet Story (“Nonetheless No Air”). That is simply the primary third of the album. It is quite a bit.
Straightforward Motion is a captivating time capsule, again to a time in America when you would scare the overall inhabitants by being too bizarre. The album is barely incohesive, with songs and parts from their pre-Alice Cooper days, after they performed because the Nazz (not the Todd Rundgren band). You may inform that the band is virtually there on Straightforward Motion. They had been lacking one thing.
The album is barely incohesive, with songs and parts from their pre-Alice Cooper days, after they performed because the Nazz (not the Todd Rundgren band).
Within the 5 a long time for the reason that authentic Alice Cooper group went its separate methods, Cooper himself has change into (rightfully) related to shock rock and horror. Alice Cooper, nevertheless, all the time had an odd cabaret ingredient to it, to the purpose that it’s odd that there hasn’t been an Alice Cooper Broadway musical but.
6
Muscle Of Love
A Band On Its Final Legs (For Now)
When Alice Cooper sat down to begin writing and recording Muscle of Love, the group began “to get an increasing number of severe concerning the materials,” in response to Cooper’s Golf Monster. He wrote how the music grew to become “an increasing number of slick and business,” and extra “deliberate” in its sound. “The songs grew to become much less reckless and fewer ingenious. There have been numerous compositions the place I mainly felt like I used to be going, ‘Okay, in case you guys actually prefer it that manner.’”
There’s a lacquer to the album that retains it from hitting more durable. “Large Apple Dreamin’ (Hippo)” opens with Bob Dolin enjoying a Deep Purple-esque organ riff. It’s very proto-metal, a sound they revisit on the title monitor. However the lead single, “Teenage Lament ’74,” comes off much less black leather-based and extra brown fringe suede jacket. Having Ronnie Spector, Liza Minnelli, and the Pointer Sisters singing backup on the monitor didn’t assist.
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There are some good songs on Muscle of Love, however the band was flaming out at that time. Their edges had been blunted and, properly… there’s a purpose why this was the final album the Alice Cooper band put out earlier than they went their separate methods.
“There was amongst us in these periods an absence of enthusiasm for pushing the Alice Cooper character as we all the time had,” wrote Dennis Dunaway in his e-book, Snakes! Guillotines! Electrical Chairs! My Adventures within the Alice Cooper Group. “You couldn’t hear it within the music. And also you didn’t sense it in our camaraderie, but it surely was lurking in our collective intestine.”
5
Pretties For You
Wait, This Is Alice Cooper? The place’s The Scary Rock?
Launched on Frank Zappa’s label, Straight Data, Pretties For You is in contrast to another Alice Cooper album, be it your entire band or any entry within the solo musician’s prolonged discography. Leaning closely into psychedelic rock and experimentation, which was the band’s forte on the time, Pretties For You is weird… in all the nice methods. The primary simple rock music (“Dwelling”) comes 5 tracks in.
There are some echoes of The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s was launched the 12 months prior, and the White Album would come out 5 months after Pretties For You). There’s additionally numerous Zappa in it; he produced the album (alongside Ian Underwood) and his presence might be felt in a few of the weirder moments.
In comparison with the remainder of the albums, Pretties For You is not probably the most Alice Cooper of Alice Cooper albums, however there’s some attraction to it. It reveals the place Alice Cooper – band and performer – was earlier than all of the snakes and guillotines. It additionally has some diamonds within the tough: the one, “Mirrored,” would later be repackaged as “Elected” for Billion Greenback Infants.
4
College’s Out
Alice Cooper’s Largest Hit, However Is It Their Greatest Album?
Sure, this appears sacrilegious. “College’s Out” is Alice Cooper’s largest hit. It reached No. 7 on the Scorching 100. It established them because the band for rebels and delinquents within the ‘70s, exhibiting off a punk angle earlier than there was punk. College’s Out, nevertheless, is simply advantageous.
It simply suffers from what occurs to many bands: reverse engineering an LP after having successful. “We needed to write an album of songs that linked with ‘College’s Out,’” Cooper advised AZCentral. “They needed to level in direction of faculty or in direction of that period of your life. I simply went again to the fact of my very own faculty.”
It simply suffers from what occurs to many bands: reverse engineering an LP after having successful.
Recorded whereas touring for Killer, and it got here out lower than 9 months after Love It To Dying. It’s a loosely-connected idea album, kicking off with “College’s Out” and ending with the bittersweet “Alma Mater.” There are dalliances with Broadway (“Gutter Cat vs. The Jets”), jazzy bar-blues (“Blue Turk”), and theatrical rock (“My Stars”). It isn’t dangerous; it simply feels a bit scattershot.
However the album did what it wanted to. Alice Cooper’s longtime supervisor, Shep Gordon, stated Killer “form of obtained us prepared” for fulfillment, whereas College’s Out was “the breakthrough, musically and identity-wise. We actually took over.”
3
Killer
Alice Cooper Exhibits They Actually Can Play
The second of two albums that Alice Cooper launched in 1971, Killer cemented the visible ingredient of each Cooper and the Alice Cooper band, with drummer Neal Smith’s pet snake Kachina on the duvet. The album, thought of by many to be the band’s finest pure rock report, kicks off with the humor rocker “Beneath My Wheels” (which stays a staple of Alice’s solo reveals). It concludes with “Useless Infants,” an anti-child abuse music, and the theatrical title monitor, which ends with what sounds just like the titular killer being subjected to an electrical chair.
Associated
16 Traditional Rock Songs That Utterly Outline The Style
There aren’t many genres of music that gained reputation after the Nineteen Sixties and 70s that weren’t immediately influenced by the rock music of that point.
The album additionally has the prog-rock influenced “Halo of Flies,” an eight-minute monitor that was composed to quiet critics who thought the band couldn’t play. “Lots of them appeared satisfied that our theatrics had been only a crutch to smokescreen our deficiencies,” Dennis Dunaway advised Outsider Rock.
“So, years later, having a bunch of extraneous riffs and melodies kicking round, we determined to use our knack for segues, and we got here up with ‘Halo of Flies.’ It was the primary time many critics lastly admitted that we might play. And it proved that the band was self-sufficient in writing their very own advanced preparations.”
2
Love It To Dying
The True First Alice Cooper Album
With out Love It To Dying, there could be no Alice Cooper as we speak – each band and individual. After two flop albums, the band lastly discovered itself after connecting with Bob Ezrin. Ezrin labored with the band, serving to them lower a few of the extra discovered on Pretties For You and Straightforward Motion. When introduced with a bluesy rock “epic,” Ezrin “whittled [it] down, dissecting every little half to ensure every thing labored and was tight,” in response to Dunaway. That “epic” grew to become a sub-three-minute rocker now often called “I’m Eighteen.”
“I’m Eighteen” is Alice Cooper’s massive breakthrough hit, reaching No. 21 on the Billboard Scorching 100. The one’s success lifted Love It To Dying to No. 21 on the Billboard 200, however the album is greater than only one hit. The band embellished its spooky, bluesy improvisation on “Black Juju,” enhancing their harmful, darkish picture (which they continued to pursue in “Is It My Physique” and “Hallowed Be My Title”).
Love It To Dying technically closes with a canopy of Rolf Harris’s “Solar Come up,” the songwriter behind the novelty hit “Tie Me Kangaroo Down.” In 2014, Harris was convicted of sexually assaulting 4 underage ladies. He died in 2023 at age 93 as a consequence of neck most cancers.
The closing songs of “Second Coming” and “Ballad of Dwight Fry” paint a terrifying, paranoid image, hinting on the terror Cooper would develop on Welcome To My Nightmare. In the end, Love It To Dying is a whole picture, a cohesive expertise from begin to end. Cooper considers it the primary actual Alice Cooper album, and it’s laborious to not disagree.
1
Billion Greenback Infants
Alice Cooper At Its Greatest
If Love It To Dying was spiritually the primary actual Alice Cooper album, then Billion Greenback Infants was spiritually the final. Although technically the penultimate launch earlier than Alice Cooper’s members scattered, it’s obtained the pomp and circumstance of the grand finale. The album opens with a bombastic model of “Howdy Hooray,” first recorded by Judy Collins. It looks like we’re on the climax of a incredible present, the curtains drawing for the ultimate act.
The album completely encapsulated Alice Cooper: the cabaret theatrics, the darkish humor, and the musicianship. Alice Cooper adopted the roles of self-deprecating jokesters. The title monitor is a self-depreciating jab, the band “making complete enjoyable of ourselves,” says Alice in Golf Monster. “We had been laughing at our viewers and at ourselves and on the circus spectacle and absurdity of our success.” Including to the absurdity, psych-folk peacenik Donovan sings on “Billion Greenback Infants.”
The album completely encapsulated Alice Cooper: the cabaret theatrics, the darkish humor, and the musicianship.
The camp in “Unfinished Candy” is paired with the sincerity of “Technology Landslide.” The laborious rock fringe of “No Extra Mr. Good Man” and “Elected” is balanced by the candy “Mary Ann.” One thing about Billion Greenback Infants clicks, and it’s profitable from the album’s begin to its closing monitor, the spookshow climax, “I Love the Useless.”
Although Billion Greenback Infants didn’t spawn a single that surpassed College’s Out’s success, it’s Alice Cooper’s business peak, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart (a feat Cooper himself wouldn’t replicate). And sadly, the success of the album fueled the band’s deterioration. Although they’d launch Muscle of Love, this album marks the (short-term finish) of Alice Cooper – however what a approach to exit.
