Alice Cooper
Along Came A Spider

In recent days, when I heard people intensely discussing the unexpected, surprising, and convincing latest work by the "wizard" Alice Cooper, while being aware that his compositional career hasn't always been consistent and fruitful from every point of view, I didn't hesitate to explore and extinguish the twenty-fifth candle of a career that, nowadays, might seem endless. Surely, he was never considered one of the major exponents of hard rock, even though he has shown us equally exhilarating proofs, but we cannot overlook the fact that he has been irreverent, disrespectful, and without a shadow of a doubt, one of the first authors to represent shock rock internationally.

You can hate him, you can love him: certainly, the insistent and sporadic criticisms have never caused discouragement and resignation during his career in front of interviews and the public. For better or for worse, he has always and brilliantly continued on his path, demonstrating that he has been promptly consistent and mature in the face of the multiple serious problems that have always hindered him (including distancing himself from the cursed alcohol he used in large doses starting from the '80s). The fact is that Alice Cooper has been reborn with this "Along Came a Spider", a concept album that arrives three years after the last perverse "Dirty Diamonds" and deals with the events of the ruthless serial killer Spider. The story of this controversial and murderous character is rather intriguing and, as usual, Alice Cooper, through his accurate lyrics and, in live shows, through his customary superstitious and unsettling gestures, has been able once again to ridicule and fall, purely, into banality although certain themes should be examined with much more seriousness and despite representing the harsh reality of the world in which we live.

No denying that Alice wanted to draw from his vast and undisputed productive repertoire, inviting the usual and expert Slash to play in the most impressive song of the entire work "Vengeance is Mine", with the aim of performing extraordinary solos able to immortalize the entire work in the years to come. The quality of the songwriting is essentially at good levels, reaching a qualitative peak with the interesting "Catch Me if You Can" and "(In Touch With) Your Feminine Side", essential in the refrain and the respective verses. Alice's ability to have successfully found appropriate melodic hooks and to have been highly sensitive (strange, isn't it?) in experimenting with new sounds, owes to songs like the opening track "Prologue/I Know Where You Live", "Killed by Love" and "Salvation". Despite being responsible from a sonic point of view for lowering the overall quality of this, ultimately, satisfying work, in "Wake The Dead" there is a harmonic solo by Ozzy Osbourne who also had the credit of writing the entire text together with Alice and Denny Saber. If he had released a video clip, I wouldn't have hesitated to describe it (it will surely target "Vengeance is Mine") because even on those occasions, I am aware of the fact that he will show all his undeniable and elevated talent as an actor/singer with the usual grin of someone who knows a lot. We can draw another curiosity from the same artwork that, surprisingly, was created, as a tribute, by the bassist Piggy D. of Rob Zombie.

An album I would definitely recommend to all his greatest fans, to those who have always loved well-executed shock rock and that stands at optimal levels, and also to all those who have always appreciated the unmistakable Fournier trademark.