Still, for the benefit of our brothers and sisters from underneath the rocks, I'll sum up Alice Cooper by saying that the guy's been around long enough to remember when rock was young (I never thought I'd get to make an Elton John reference before now...), releasing his first album (as part of a band with the name Alice Cooper: Alice was just a persona that was used by the band's frontman, then called Vincent Damon Furnier) in June 1969 (titled Pretties For You). It wasn't until the band's third album (February 1971's Love It To Death) that they started to resemble the Alice Cooper known today, as their first two albums were more psychedelic in sound and didn't really have a hard rock sound to them. After that, though, the band's style of music swapped to a hard rock sound and, up until Muscle Of Love (released in November 1973), the band stuck together. After that, the band went on what was meant to be a hiatus, but, after Vincent changed his name to legally be Alice Cooper, he opted to continue as a solo project, releasing his first solo album in February 1975.
That album was Welcome To My Nightmare.
And...well, Alice is still around now, so you can safely assume that it was a success! While Alice did go a bit off the rails once the 80's started (and, arguably, a bit before that too), he recovered from that one after taking a break from the music industry and, once he released Trash in July 1989 (and I've just realised that album is now nearly 25 years old...), he cemented a comeback that is still ongoing today.
September 2011 saw the release of a sequel to Welcome To My Nightmare.
And...well, reactions to it were rather mixed among Cooper's fanbase. Some despise it, some like it. About the only thing agreed upon is that it's not as good as the original.
But does that necessarily make it a bad album? Well, let's dig into it and find out!
First of all, the cover art. I have to say, I like the throwback to the artwork of the original! Sure, it's not quite as iconic as the original's artwork, but it's still pretty cool! The digitally generated Alice doesn't quite look right, but I guess you could argue that it makes some degree of sense to have Alice look a bit off, as it makes him look creepy.
So, onto the album!
Now, in the interest of fairness, I've not heard any Alice Cooper stuff post-Trash apart from this album, so I might be about to display my ignorance of something that's been around for a while, but I can't help noticing that there is the use of auto tune on this album, and not necessarily for effect. I can let it slide for "I Am Made Of You", as it makes Alice sound hollow in a way that works for the song (and, I suspect, that's what Alice was going for), but the other appearances of it on the album just don't fit. I've mentioned before that I'm not completely opposed to auto tune on principle alone, but I tend to only let it slide when it's obviously being done for effect (like with "I Am Made Of You"): if you're doing it anywhere else, you've got off on the wrong foot with me from the start. So, pop producers who are reading this (for some odd reasons..why are you reading a blog predominantly focused on rock and metal music, anyway?), dial back on the overuse of auto tune and restrict it only for being used as an effect when it suits the song, please! And, while you're at it, let the guys in charge of mastering know that they don't need to master everything to death (even if you have to tell the label executives to go stuff themselves about creating a less dynamic version of the song: louder doesn't equal better, otherwise we'd be happier to listen to a nuclear bomb going off than we would be to hear "Bohemian Rhapsody"!): dynamics are important to have in music, and I don't mean you should go from "barely audible" to "DEAR GOD, I CAN'T HEAR A THING! I'M DEAF!" in the space of a second.
...Sorry, I've lost track of where I was going with that.
Anyway, Alice provides a surprisingly large amount of variety on this album. It's fair to say that this isn't a case of Alice just writing the same song again and trying to pass it off as different from some other song he's done (looking at you, extreme metal scene!), and, even better, most of the variety actually works pretty well! Probably the weirdest example on the album is "Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever", which is best summed up as disco meets Alice Cooper. While Cooper is clearly poking fun at the disco scene with this song (and has a quasi-rap delivery to his vocals for the verses of the song), I have to say that I actually quite like this track, as it's VERY different from what he's done on any of his previous album (well...maybe not his New Wave stuff at the start of the 80's, but I've not listened to that, so don't quote me on that one!) and he manages to pull it off very nicely. I can understand why people wouldn't like it, but this kind of dark disco sound just sounds brilliant to me and is something I'd like to hear more people give a go at! Mind you, I actually quite enjoy disco music, so I'd just be happy to hear more people try to give a go at making proper disco music today...and no, I don't count dance music as a spin off of disco music: I want actual disco music, not some crap which thinks that providing a beat and telling people to dance qualifies as music to dance to!
...Sorry, I've gone off track again.
Anyway, the important thing to notice is that Alice still does his usual brand of hard rock at several points on the album, with probably the coolest example that springs to mind being "Caffeine". I guess the big problem is that there's so much variety on display across the album that it's actually a bit of a surprise when the hard rock songs show up, as you've gotten so used to everything else that you can forget you're listening to an album by a hard rock artist. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but it's really weird to go from hearing the vaguely jazzy "Last Man On Earth" to hearing "The Congregation", even when you know it's coming from multiple listens! To be fair, this was something the original album did (go listen to "Black Widow" and then follow that up with "Department Of Youth". Do they even sound like they should be on the same album?), but Cooper had a better mix of hard rock material and everything else on Welcome To My Nightmare compared to this album. Depending on what you define as being hard rock and how much you like to nitpick about genres, you might get as little as three tracks which are undeniably hard rock, which isn't great when you realise that there are fourteen tracks on this album! I personally don't have a huge problem with this (if I think a song's a good song, I just think it's a good song and don't get worked out what genre of music it's in!), but I can imagine some people having a huge issue with this fact. Personally, I think you're getting worked out about nothing if you think a song is bad just because it's not in a certain genre of music, but that's just my opinion.
Unfortunately, this variety does come at a cost: when the variety doesn't work, it highlights the fact that Cooper's career, while built upon writing strong songs, isn't necessarily built upon providing the listener with a really deep listening experience. "What Baby Wants" springs to mind at the moment: while I don't think Ke$ha is the best vocalist to sing alongside Cooper by any measure (and her presence dates the record more than Cooper probably realises it does), the song is fine (although Ke$ha's use of auto tune is very noticeable) until you realise that there's actually not a lot to it. While I don't think the song is bad just for being a relatively simple song (heck, part of the reason I like listening to folk and punk music when not reviewing metal is because I like the styles of music for being fairly simple and unpretentious), it does harm the song more than it really should do. I also have to point out that "Ghouls Gone Wild" (...OK, I actually kind of like that title!) suffers a bit from trying a bit too hard to sound like The Beach Boys, as it only highlights just how hard it is to sound like The Beach Boys when you notice how far off of the mark Cooper actually is. Most of the variety could be fairly put down to personal taste though, as none of the songs are outright bad (although I don't see a lot of Alice Cooper fans liking "Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever" or "What Baby Wants" in the slightest) and only really suffer from a lack of complexity that will make you want to listen to the songs deeper to spot the subtleties that make the songs so enjoyable for more than one listen.
Before I start coming across as a pretentious critic decrying something for a lack of complexity, let me look at the performances across the album. Well, the music is well performed by the musicians (some of whom are the remaining living members of the original Alice Cooper band, incidentally enough: they play on three of the tracks, but I can't remember which ones at the minute, so feel free to google that if you're really interested!), but the question that's going to be the one on most people's minds is how Alice Cooper himself sounds. Well, you can tell his voice is noticeable lower than it was in the 70's and he doesn't have quite the same range or power to his voice, but, apart from that, he's still pretty much how you'd expect him to sound, which is rather impressive for a guy who has been singing pretty much constantly for over 40 years! The use of auto tune does strike me as a bit concerning, as I've mentioned earlier, but not to the extent that I have to wonder how much longer his voice is going to last, as there are songs on the album where I could not pick up a single bit of auto tune on his voice. So, since I've not listened to anything else of Cooper's stuff post-Trash, I'm going to give Cooper the benefit of the doubt regarding whether the use of auto tune is covering his voice having gone downhill for now. If it's still there on his next album, though...well, I'm going to not be impressed.
The production is pretty good, although it does suffer from my usual complaint regarding the bass (luckily, the mastering issue isn't too bad here). Not really a lot more for me to say there: I'd have liked a bit more bass, but that's about all I can really say about it at the minute.
So, final thoughts? Well, as an album in and of itself, Welcome 2 My Nightmare arguably suffers a bit too much from conforming to the necessities of modern popular music through the use of auto tune and the appearance of a then-popular pop singer on the album (I know she's still fairly popular now, but I think it's important to remember that, if Ke$ha does turn out to be a flash in the pan, her appearance will really date this record) and a lack of musical focus that leaves you wondering at points whether Cooper forgot that he's an icon of hard rock and that, as such, he needs to remember to actually perform hard rock music. As a sequel to Welcome To My Nightmare, I can't really say this succeeds, as we don't really get a feeling of this record being a continuation of what Cooper did on that album, but it doesn't completely fail either, as there's still a lot to enjoy on here if you approach it from the perspective of it just being an album and try not to compare it to Welcome To My Nightmare. If you're an Alice Cooper fan, you probably have had this album for a while now and know where you stand on a lot of the stuff already, but, if you're not an Alice Cooper fan, I see no harm in giving this album a listen. The appeal to modern trends isn't exactly something that I'd like to see Cooper doing more of in the future, but he keeps enough of a foot in the past that I can see fans of old school hard rock finding some stuff to enjoy on this album. Basically, if you're not too fussed about the genre of what you're listening to providing it's still a good song, you should really enjoy this album, but everyone else will probably be advised to approach this album with caution, as it probably won't provide you with a completely worthwhile listening experience.
Final Rating: 6 Out Of 10
A fairly enjoyable album that sometimes forgets what it's meant to be and makes a bit of a mistake by sticking one foot into modern popular music trends which mesh poorly with Cooper's old fashioned style, but which should be worth a listen to people who aren't too fussed about genre definitions and whatnot.
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