Welcome To My Nightmare - Alice Cooper

 

Provenance: I was already deep into my Cooper fandom by the time I got this album. A fandom, I should add, that my dad is directly responsible for.

Formative experiences with live music can be, if not always life-changing, then choice-affirming; I've mentioned it before but seeing Alice Cooper top a bill that included Orange Goblin and Dio was one of those instances where I felt everything clicked into place. I now own multiple albums of each artist.

Incidentally, I realise that I have yet to delve into the band Alice Cooper thus far on this blog, whose output many critics rate as superior. Guess what? They're probably right. Guess what? I don't care, this is my little corner of cyberspace and I'll happily keep on pushing the likes of Trans, Recycler and Chinese Democracy over and above more canonical works of those respective artists.

Review: Nobody's arguing the toss as to the position of Welcome To My Nightmare in the Cooper back catalogue; this ain't no DaDa or Zipper Catches Skin. Any Coop fan will have this in their collection, the only wrinkle being that this was the first record sans Smith, Bruce, Dunaway and Buxton. Which should be a big loss, as nothing else that I've heard to date has quite sounded like the original Alice Cooper band. Furthermore, if I was indulging in putting together a fantasy supergroup, Dennis Dunaway is probably the leading candidate in the bass slot.

But these are ruminations for another time! I'll hopefully get around to Killer and Billion Dollar Babies one day, which will give me ample time to blather about Dunaway; I wish no disservice to the bassists who actually played on Welcome To My Nightmare, Prakash John and noted rock slaphead / Chapman stick-botherer Tony Levin. Anyway, who's complaining about Tony Levin being up in your business? Not me.  

Probably the biggest misconception about Alice Cooper is that he is a heavy metal artist. Yeah, he has been, now and again, especially when he relinquished the mantle of innovation to chase trends in a bid for relevance. Yet whilst there are elements of hard rock on Welcome To My Nightmare, if I may go all Jilly Goolden on you, there are also strong overtones of glam-rock, prog and even musical showtunes in the mix. In that respect, it's not so different from many other rock albums starting from the Pretty Things' remarkable S.F. Sorrow insofar as here is a version of popular music that is all grown up. Making the admixture of genres and influences come together to into a unified whole is a different kettle of fish, however.

I am happy, nay, gleeful, to report that Welcome To My Nightmare pulls off this high-wire act with aplomb. That the sequencing means we can bounce from the heavy riffing of 'The Black Widow' to 'Some Folks', which sounds like a demented twist on something from West Side Story, then onto the balladry of 'Only Women Bleed' - successfully - is testament to both the quality of the music and a kind of quiet internal logic holding it all together.

When I see Alice Cooper perform live, one of my favourite moments of the show is when he unhooks a set of supplementary 'arms' on his specially prepared jacket to signal the pummelling intro to 'The Black Widow', a genuine headbanger with a seasick bassline and weird lyrics about a spider-king that rules the earth. On record the effect is hardly diminished, and in fact it could be argued that this is the definitive version because it contains the lengthy spoken-word introduction, performed by the immortal Vincent Price. Truly, I feel a little kick of joy in my heart every time 'Devil's Food' begins to fade and I hear that lubricious, cartoon-sinister voice intone "Leaving lepidoptera - please don't touch the display, little boy...".

It's worth sticking with that trifecta of songs to reflect on 'Only Women Bleed' for a moment. In today's climate it seems like an impossibly clumsy song to be sung by a man, but behind the yuks of the double entendre lies an oddly tender song about the endurance of women suffering from domestic abuse. There has always been an intelligence behind Cooper's lyrics, something Bob Dylan has publicly acknowledged, but sympathetic takes for the victims of domestic abuse were rare in the era of 'wimmin'-dun-me-wrong' chest-beating mid-70s rock. Who else did something like this? Perhaps Cheap Trick with 'The House Is Rockin'', though they always had a knack of wrapping razorblades in bubblegum.

Anyway, not long after 'Only Women Bleed' is 'Cold Ethyl', a paean to necrophilia that landed him in hot water with the columnist Ann Landers. It also happens to be the best hard rock track on Welcome To My Nightmare, a song that Slash has claimed as his favourite. Catch me in the right mood and it's probably mine, too.

What comes after 'Cold Ethyl' is a succession of tracks that forms a mini-opera about an individual named Steven, who appears to be suffering from hallucinations, paranoia and a few other things. Whilst much of everything preceding has smacked of Grand Guignol fun 'n' frolics (bar 'Only Women Bleed'), the tonal shift to something edgier and darker makes this an uncomfortable listen. The tension, however, is broken by the album's final cut, the Kim Fowley-penned three-minute glam-slam of 'Escape', as bouncy and celebratory as it ever got for Coop. Still, the question lingers - is Welcome To My Nightmare a concept album in disguise? Has every musical turn and chicane been a wander through Steven's imagination? Does it matter?

When push comes to shove, these questions just add to the overall enjoyment of Welcome To My Nightmare. The fate of Steven is left unresolved, and so are my questions. I don't mind sitting with ambiguity, it doesn't feel like a cheat - especially if it's the price on pays to fully appreciate the five-star brilliance of this most colourful, sparkiest, imaginative artefact of 1970s rock. 

Stronger WithEach Tear - Mary J Blige

Provenance: My wonderful partner, the poet Sea Sharp (and here I'm sounding like Vincent Price, who always referred to his wife as "the actress Coral Browne" (I sincerely hope your inner voice read that out in his voice)) was given this as a graduation present.

I want to preface this by saying that tonight will be the first time I'll have ever listened to this album, and indeed, any Mary J Blige album. To my discredit, my knowledge of Blige and her output could easily be written on a postage stamp, leaving enough room for me to list my favourite Steely Dan songs, which happens to be all of them.

Review: First off, without even hearing a note, what is this horseshit cover art? A nice big picture of the artist, her name's nice and clear, and the album is called Stronger, fine. But what's this? On closer inspection there's a kind of subscript under the word 'stronger' seemingly designed solely for the benefit of amoebas or protozoic lifeforms, and it reads thusly - 'withEach Tear'. Thanks Blige - Stronger withEach Tear looks absolutely stupid and you've given me eye strain.

However - there's a sizeable portion of my album collection that features terrible cover art (mostly in the heavy metal genre) and I still dig the sounds, so let's judge this on the music. 'Tonight' starts off promisingly enough, with a grainy, pulsing Wu-Tang bassline overlain with a shimmering synthesizer borrowed from Fat Larry Band's 'Zoom'. I certainly like Blige's voice, and on this and subsequent track 'The One' it's manipulated with clever production to produce a range of interesting effects. Both are in a minor key and ride atop edgy, tricky beats, generating a skin-tightening tension that I really enjoyed.

It dips a bit on 'Said and Done', as a lubricious synth riff gives way to a fairly bland-sounding chorus; even so, the rather neat darkwave influences make it worthwhile. The next track is where everything turns to moose manure; 'Good Love' is an uptempo frothing fountain of piss, anchored by Club Tropicana brass and a guest verse from T.I. that did negative things to my I.Q. 'I Feel Good' can't be any worse, but it sounds like the Des'Ree / China Black collaboration that nobody asked for.

It becomes uncomfortably clear that on SwET, Blige is far more accomplished with the gritty, sultry or aggressive material than she is with the brighter, shinier gubbins. It's fair to say that the rest of the album plays out this way. Blige's voice is a thing of beauty, possessing clarity in full voice and a hint of bite when in declamatory mode. Her producers (and they are legion) have also used phasing and filtering effects intelligently; on 'I Luv U' for example, the combination is quite subtle, the mixture of natural and robotic voices turning the track into a tour-de-force of wind-tunnel techno-eroticism. It's the last truly great track on the album, but it's a cracker. Closing track 'I Can See In Color' comes close to greatness. Blige puts her full dynamic range on display out in front of the kind of downbeat heavy-lidded soul track that used to cook behind one of those characteristically gargantuan Isaac Hayes slow jams.

I can't say that I've become a fan of Mary J Blige since listening to SwET but I have become an admirer, albeit with qualifications. Blige is certainly a masterful singer, and with sympathetic material is absolutely capable of bashing out a masterpiece. The thing is, I don't know quite which direction would best serve Blige best. On the one hand, I'd love to hear a full album of her duking it out with Daft Punk in futuristic heaven; on the other hand, 'I Can See In Color' hints at the possibilities of Blige looking backwards and recording steamy, funky soul with the Swampers (or whatever their latter-day equivalent is) down at Muscle Shoals. With this much talent, it's perhaps hard to know which way to turn - which is also a reasonable summation of Stronger WithEach Tear (seriously, fuck this album title).