Post
by GailsFriend » Mon Sep 26, 2016 2:50 pm
Alice Cooper has been a force to reckon with for decades...four to be exact. Narrowing down his discography to just the "best of" is quite difficult. This will be no exception. As far as albums go, most of his music is quite stellar, when the period of the decade is considered. Alice has always surrounded himself with great musicians and producers and songwriters, who have brought the best out of Mr. Cooper's concepts. If a rating scale could suffice, we will try to keep it simple: just between 1 and 5. It's a relief to know now, that all of Alice's albums fall between 2 and 5. All of this is really subjective, but I will try to keep my bias in check. Here it is:
5=Great,
4=Good,
3=Fair,
2=Meh...
Got it? Okay. Bad News First...Albums that I voted 2:
Brutal Planet,
Dragontown,
The Eyes of Alice Cooper,
Dirty Diamonds, and
Along Came A Spider. Why? These albums all suffer from a lack of time spent in the studio to polish the songs, production flaws and subpar writing from the Coop.
Albums that I voted 3:
Pretties For You,
Easy Action,
Constrictor,
Raise Your Fist And Yell,
Trash, and
Hey Stoopid. Why? These albums have better concepts but, kinda of miss the mark in imagination or complete cohesion.
Albums that I voted 4:
Muscle Of Love,
Goes To Hell, and
Lace & Whiskey. These albums have a lot of variety in their styles, so beauty is in the ear of the listener.
The Best has been saved for last....
The albums I voted with a 5:
Love It To Death,
Killer, School's Out,
Billion Dollar Babies,
Welcome To My Nightmare,
From The Inside,
Flush The Fashion,
Special Forces,
Zipper Catches Skin,
Dada,
The Last Temptation,
Welcome 2 My Nighmare and
The Hollywood Vampires. These albums are great from beginning to end with lots of ear candy.
This is where things get even more tricky, we are going to rank these albums from 1 to 27, according to their ability to be awesome.
1) Killer,
2) Welcome To My Nightmare,
3) From The Inside.
4) Special Forces,
5) Raise Your Fist And Yell,
6) Hey Stoopid,
7) The Last Temptation,
8) Welcome 2 My Nightmare,
9) School's Out,
10) Love It To Death,
11) Billion Dollar Babies,
12) Goes To Hell,
13) Muscle Of Love,
14) Lace & Whiskey,
15) Flush The Fashion,
16) Zipper Catches Skin,
17) Raise Your Fist And Yell,
18) Trash,
19) Dragontown,
20) Dirty Diamonds,
21) Easy Action,
22) Pretties For You,
23) DaDa,
24) Along Came A Spider,
25) The Eyes Of Alice Cooper,
26) Brutal Planet,
27) Hollywood Vampires.
Most of Alice's albums received better scores for their packaging, songwriting and production and concepts, the rest failed to achieve this marks in some form or fashion. For example: Hollywood Vampires received a 5 score because I believe the versions of covers were executed well and the production & performance is stellar; but, it is at the bottom in the ranking because these are cover songs, and the original songs that were given are just, good, not amazing.
Again, all of this is really subjective to the listener; but, every album from Alice Cooper has at least three songs that are catchy and well-made, even on the "worst" recordings...which is why all the albums never were voted below a score of 2.
"What part of DEAD don't you get?"