Alice Cooper still bugs us decades later
Alice Cooper is still sick after all these years.
Oh, the real-life Vincent Furnier is doing fine, making records, hosting a syndicated radio show and playing lots of golf. But his onstage alter ego still needs some serious help.
Cooper has long loved to shock and horrify audiences, be it odes to necrophilia ("I Love The Dead") or tales of neglected children ("Dead Babies.") This concept album is the story of a serial killer who calls himself The Spider, kidnapping women, wrapping them in silk and cutting one leg off each.
It's some pretty disturbing stuff, and probably not the best thing for 13-year-old boys to hear. But those boys are the primary audience for horror movies and violent video games, so this album knows its -- pardon the pun -- target audience.
It starts with The Spider stalking a woman in "I Know Where You Live," continuing with his festering resentments in "Vengeance Is Mine," (with a lead guitar assist from Slash -- apparently no pun intended there).
From there, things head south in a hurry. "Catch Me If You Can" shows The Spider taunting authorities, "Wrapped In Silk" describes how he kills his victims, asking them what they're feeling at different stages of their murder, and we can only hope "I'm Hungry" isn't to be taken literally.
Toward the end, The Spider wonders if he can ever be forgiven for his crimes in "Salvation," but ends up revealing from a cell (in either a prison or a psych ward) that it was all just a demented fantasy in the mind of Steven, a psycho killer from past Cooper lore already serving time for some other ugliness.
Musically, the disc harkens back to old-school Alice, closest to the "Love It To Death" era, with some modern touches thrown in. Time-share (with Kiss) drummer Eric Singer provides a solid underpinning to the mayhem.
CHECK THIS TRACK OUT: Though most of the songs here are pretty chilling, the creepiest is "The One That Got Away," in which The Spider ponders whether to let a particular victim go, or whether to dismember and dispose of her in a particularly gruesome way.