Album: Alice Cooper – Raise the Dead: Live From Wacken

Released October 22^nd

UDR Music

4/10

Alice Cooper Live from Wacken is ballsy and loud, and if you don’t like that why would you buy an Alice Cooper album? Well I don’t like that. This album serves only to evidence the irrefutable fact that everything Alice Cooper has ever released sounds exactly the same. Like a high schoolers high on volume and distortion, Cooper and his backing band launch through the shock rock singers back catalogue to the applause of the audience, but to the horror of me!

There are good songs in Cooper’s locker. It would be unfair to suggest that ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’ or ‘Poison’ aren’t canonical works in the rocks discography. A huge failing of this album is Cooper’s apparent penchant for shitting on cornerstones of popular music.

His combination of ‘Schools Out’ (his most famous song) and ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ is 7 minutes of wall of sound murder. He also covers ‘Break on Through’, turning a Doors classic into (you guessed it) a wall of sound. The Beatles are next, Cooper’s ‘Revolution’ interpretation finally answering the question of what Oasis would have sounded like had they have gone the whole hog with their Beatles impersonation.

Cooper can roll out celebrity friends like Johnny Depp all he likes, but using voodoo to reincarnate Jim Morrison on stage wouldn’t have saved these covers.

Cooper has his audience and based on the screams in between songs they love him. That or the post production’s use of canned cheering was liberal to say the least. Wacken is hardly a festival that screams out for bands exploiting subtlety in their output, and so Cooper’s combination of raucous music and wild stage show is perfect for its environment.

The DVD makes for a funny watch, Cooper defying age, strutting around making Mick Jagger’s descent into old age look graceful. Overall it’s the output of an artist at the end of his career but you know what, it’s been a long innings at the top. Cooper’s clearly doing something right.