Nostalgic, Alice Cooper? In recent years, the mood has regularly been to look back, as with Detroit Stories released in 2021, or when guitarist Michael Bruce, drummer Neal Smith and bassist Dennis Dunaway played I'm Eighteen and School's Out together in 2011 at the time of their induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame... After all, even Welcome 2 my Nightmare (also 2011), though musically not very old-fashioned, took us back to the 70s to offer a follow-up to the first album released by Alice Cooper without his “historic” band. The Revenge of Alice Cooper is the first with the original band since the time before Welcome to my Nightmare: although they had met up again, they hadn't recorded together since 1973 (guitarist Glen Buxton, who died in 1997, is also included with previously unreleased recordings). The revenge of the title is, in a way, the revenge of the Alice Cooper Band, symbolised since 1975 by its sole singer.
Such a reunion inevitably sets a mood: you don't listen to The Revenge of Alice Cooper to be surprised, or to explore new roads. No weird avant-garde things that have always divided fans (no featuring with Xzibit in sight!). In fact, the surprise may come from the band's vigour. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen “the Coop” live on stage recently: he's approaching 80 with impressive youthful energy and the sinister words he recites as an intro to Black Mamba (with Robby Krieger from The Doors), menacing and sinister, still invariably provoke that little shiver. The band take their time, the tempo is slow, the bass lurks, hypnotic, while Cooper excels in his role as eerie narrator.
As the album gradually takes us back to a time when dark and terrifying things were still the work of a few hippies weirder than the rest, the pace picks up. How many tracks from this album will be included in future Alice Cooper concerts? Probably very few, one or two. Let's bet on Wild Ones (a tribute to the rebellious cry that was the film The Wild One with Marlon Brando), Up All Night or What Happened to You (with a Buxton riff dating from 73), the kind of energetic rock'n'roll anthems you find in a Greatest Hits compilation. It grooves, it works, but we're not going to lie to you: we like ghosts and gloomier things. In this respect, Kill the Flies is our favourite track on the album. Set in a spooky atmosphere, Cooper takes on the role of the servile Renfield, Dracula's assistant, in a sequel to Ballad of Dwight Fry (named after Dwight Frye, who played Renfield in Browning's 1931 Dracula). Eating flies, locked up in his asylum cell, is a healthy activity, just the way we like it!
Ghosts, time: The Revenge of Alice Cooper may seem to cross the decades to take us back fifty years, unless it actually comes from that time, but the weight of the years is still working on this band of dashing quasi-octogenarians. Alice Cooper sings about being ‘65 and yet I'm still alive’ on Crap That gets in the Way of Your Dreams, with a macabre sense of humour that extends to his voice, a caricature of an old man. It's great fun! It's less fun, though, at the end of the record, when the premonitory and melancholy See You on the Other Side could just as easily be a farewell as a tribute to Buxton - the guitarist may be absent, but his spectre is omnipresent.
With its load of catchy tracks, its strong blues roots (Inter Galactic Vagabond Blues or the cover of Yarbirds' I Ain't Done Wrong), its ballads and its ghosts of the past (even recent ones: Famous Face is a track that was announced in 2020 for The Michael Bruce Band's debut album... of which there has been no news since, so here are some remnants at last), The Revenge of Alice Cooper is everything you could expect from a reunion after such a long period. The boxes have been ticked one by one, but the most important one is quality: yes, it works. No, it's not lazy, sloppy or senile. You're entitled to prefer the more theatrical and grandiloquent Alice Cooper, or even to secretly enjoy his deviant experiments that make purists sick, but by opting for simplicity here, the band doesn't risk screwing up or caricaturing itself. It's not cheesy, because it doesn't try to “sound young”; on the contrary, the result is timeless. The Revenge of Alice Cooper is an effective, immediate album whose nostalgic approach doesn't spoil its spontaneity. A masterpiece? No. But, having just learned of the death of Ozzy Osbourne, let's rejoice in the fact that we can still party with these sacred monsters.
