Another long day that started
early, but I capped it with a good workout and am feeling rather pleased with
myself as a result. Also, I enjoyed my latest album – it is almost like this CD
Odyssey I am on is filled with albums right out of my own collection…
Disc 710 is…. The Last Temptation
Artist: Alice
Cooper
Year of Release: 1994
What’s up with the Cover? A nightmarish
collage of temptations and troubled figures, gathered around the master of the
macabre himself, Alice Cooper. Alice appears to be casting a spell over some
sort of mystical Bunsen burner. Or he could just be trying to get warm – he’s
so cold he’s gone blue!
How I Came To Know It: Believe it or not there was a
period when I stopped buying Alice Cooper albums. After 1991’s “Hey Stoopid” I
was starting to feel like he didn’t have another really great record in him so
I moved on. Also, I was really heavily into folk music in the early nineties,
and my obsession left little room for other styles.
Then ten
years later I was given 2001’s “Dragontown” for my birthday and I discovered
I’d just missed a relative renaissance of Cooper’s career. I earnestly began to
drill backward until I finally got to “The Last Temptation.”
How It Stacks Up: I have 26 Alice Cooper albums, which I think is all
of them. “The Last Temptation” holds up pretty strong – definitely top half,
although probably not top ten. I’ll put it 11th.
Rating: 4 stars.
For five years from 1986 to 1991 a newly sober Alice Cooper decided he
was going to be an eighties metal star. When I was a teenager it made me
perfectly happy, but these albums have not aged all that well. “The Last
Temptation” is Alice shedding notions of what he ‘should’ do to be successful
and getting back to doing what he does best: mixing shock rock with broad and
ambitious musical concepts.
The album is the first in a loose trilogy of records which continues
with “Brutal Planet” (2000) and “Dragontown” (2001) that explain the fall of
man into damnation. The theme becomes progressively broader on the later
records, but on “The Last Temptation” it is focused on one man’s temptation.
“The Last Temptation” is almost a sequel to 1976’s “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell” except instead of it all happening in a dream sequence, you get the
impression that it is happening for real. The circus has come to town, Bradbury
style, and the devil’s got an offer you can’t refuse. Cue music.
The first song is “Sideshow”
which is a passable track that introduces the titular temptation. Passable
except for one thing – it pretty much pulls its melody wholesale out of the
Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket.” I’d
like to think it is an homage, given the similar themes of consumer/wish
culture, but I can’t deny what I heard and the liner notes don’t have any
credits noting the Clash.
With that one sour note out of the way, “The Last Temptation” steps up
and delivers an amazing journey through Alice Cooper’s favourite recurring theme
– getting dragged to hell. As a recovering alcoholic and born again Christian
it isn’t a surprising theme for him, but for all that I don’t know anyone who
does it with quite the same panache as he does.
Cooper’s signature take on empty consumer culture is on fine display in “Lost
in America” which is one half indictment of the lack of opportunity and one
half indictment of the people who use that as an excuse to not move forward.
The song opens:
“I can’t get a girl cuz I ain’t got
a car
I can’t get a car cuz I ain’t got a
job
I can’t get a job cut I ain’t got a
car
So I’m looking for a girl with a job
and a car.”
It is this kind of logic that’ll get you signing a deal with the devil.
Later the album introduces us to other lost souls in the devil’s
playground. My favourite is “Smoky Joe” who appears on the song “Bad Place Alone.” Smoky Joe is described
as “thin as a coroner’s needle”
shaking like a cold Chihuahua, with a runny nose and a road map on his arm. It
is all so delightfully grim.
The album alternates from heavy, crunchy rock to more ballad-like
structures and is reminiscent of Cooper’s early records with the Alice Cooper
band. The mix shows that Alice has finally synthesized the lessons he learned
from eighties metal back into his own style. He’s absorbed it, dissected it and
now he can simply add it to his repertoire without letting it rule the entire
sound of his record. It is a welcome evolution.
When the songs get stripped down, such as on “Stolen Prayer” and “It’s Me”
you can hear Cooper’s vocals, that are still very strong at this stage of his
career. He tends to sing a lot of songs in a raspy tone, but on tracks like
these you get to see his range, switching from smooth and folksy up into
controlled aggression with equal ease.
The album ends with “Cleansed by
Fire” a fine - if over-amped - rejection of the devil song. Instead of
waking up, as he does at the end of “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell” here Cooper’s
character (the ever-present Steven) is awake the whole time and needs simply to
apply his wits sufficiently to not sell his soul. Not to worry though, he’s
back in 2008 making bad decisions on “Along Came a Spider.”
I don’t typically want to know much about the albums I review, but while
looking up some minor detail about “The Last Temptation” I discovered it is
also a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman. It shouldn’t influence how I feel about
the record, but damn it I love Neil Gaiman, and it makes me enjoy “The Last
Temptation” even more.
Best
tracks: Lost in
America, Stolen Prayer, Unholy War, Lullaby, It’s Me