CD Odyssey Disc 833: Alice Cooper

Once again I am home late and tonight I have company coming over at eight. Hopefully I can squeeze in this next review so I don’t have to listen to this album for another day.

Disc 833 is….Brutal Planet

Artist: Alice Cooper

Year of Release: 2000

What’s up with the Cover? This is a weird one, in that this is not the correct cover. This is some special edition import that looks very hastily thrown together (the booklet is a very quick history of Alice Cooper’s career clearly written for someone who has never heard of him). Part of me likes having this version, cheesy viper animation and all. Part of me wishes I had the original, which looks like this:

Meh. Neither one is that great, I suppose.

How I Came To Know It: I just buy all of Alice Cooper’s stuff. For a while I had given up, so I probably bought “Brutal Planet” about seven years after it came out, which would coincide with the date stamped on this re-issue.

How It Stacks Up:  I expected more from this album, and had left a spot for it at #14 out of my 26 Alice Cooper albums. Instead, it fell all the way down to lowly 24^th out of 26 total Alice Cooper albums in my collection. Sorry, Alice. As a result everything already rated between #15 and #24 got a one slot boost.

Ratings: 2 stars

“Brutal Planet” is the middle album in a trilogy released from 1994-2001 where Cooper explores the fall of mankind into damnation. The bookends of this trilogy (“The Last Temptation” and “Dragontown”) are two of my favourite Alice Cooper albums, but “Brutal Planet” does not hold up nearly as well as its compatriots.

First the good, because there is some. There is a power to this album and it was fun to listen to Alice Cooper embrace the heavy metal stylings of his day. The first two tracks are strong. “Brutal Planet” (the song) is an introduction to the themes of a planet doomed by sin, violence and excess and “Wicked Young Man” personalizes that wickedness in the form of a single person, self-absorbed and full of hate.

The title track is particularly dark with a pounding beat and Alice angrily spitting about excess and sin:

“Here's where we starve the hungry

Here's where we cheat the poor

Here's where we beat the children

Here is where we pay the whores”

Cooper has a real gift in infusing his lyrics with import, but that example above (judgey comment about prostitution notwithstanding) is about as good as it gets. The rest of the record has Alice trying to be as shocking as he can, but instead ends up making awkward and strained rhymes like these from “It’s The Little Things”:

“You can steal my car

And drive it into the lake

You can stick me in the oven

And put it on bake.”

That line belongs in a kid’s poem about Hansel and Gretl, not a metal album.

The other challenge is the evidence of the Loudness Wars on this album’s production, where every dial just seems turned up too far. It is great for chunky riff-driven songs like “Eat Some More” but overall I thought the record would have benefited from being turned down to a respectable level. Like 11.

Alice has been trying to remake his 1975 classic “Only Women Bleed” for years, and the entry on “Brutal Planet” is “Take It Like A Woman.” This song feels like it could be on Heart’s “Bad Animals” with all its organ and empty bombast, but it lacks the subtlety Alice is looking for. It isn’t a terrible song; it just reminds me of a host of Alice Cooper songs that are similar but better.

If you are an Alice Cooper completionist (and I am) you should get this album. Otherwise, I would encourage you to steer toward “Dragontown,” an album with similar themes but better songs, better lyrics and better sound.

Best tracks:  Brutal Planet, Wicked Young Man, Eat Some More