In my comments to School’s Out, I mentioned how Alice Cooper (which at this stage refers equally to the band as a whole as to the frontman) had a certain knowing sense of artifice about the music. Here, I think, they ramp up the theatricality another notch. Probably because the success of the previous album has propelled them to playing to larger and larger audiences.
The album opener, Hello Hooray, is a curtain-raiser song, welcome to the carnival. Although the more famous tracks on here (Elected and No More Mister Nice Guy) are solid bits of rock, they’re not the most exciting nor innovative songs on the album.
Better is the track Generation Landslide which, with its harmonica (from Cooper) and closing guitar solo (Glen Buxton) sounds like a Rolling Stones track would sound if they ever got the recording mix to not sound tinny. The title track, Billion Dollar Babies, features some glorious riff work by the rhythm section – Dennis Dunaway running up and down the fret of his bass, and Neal Smith providing some complex fills on drums.
Things get more experimental on Sick Things, a slow, dark, pulsing song that made me imagine Cooper sprouting giant spider legs on stage and stalking out amid the audience, hoovering up the “sick things, pretty things” with an over-sized mouth. Yes, I have that kind of imagination. Meanwhile, Unfinished Sweet is a horror story about a trip to the dentist, complete with sound effects that seem based on pulling a cork out of a bottle, and a little like the early Velvet Underground tracks.
In some ways, Alice Cooper are like a dark mirror version of Queen, Cooper’s stage persona larger than life and commanding adoration from the fans in the same way as Freddy Mercury, even the transvestite love story Mary-Ann with its vaudeville piano was Queen-esque in the melody, as is the closing anthem to necrophilia, I Love The Dead. Topics that Queen would never touch, but performed here with the same kind of musicality and theatricality as Mercury and Co. would put on.
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