156. Alice Cooper / Brutal Planet. 2000. 4/5.

As the calendar clicked over to the year 2000, Vincent Furnier was about to enter his fifth decade in the music business, quite an achievement for someone with the rather unusual name of Vincent Furnier. You of course know him better as Alice Cooper, an artist who had found many of the potholes along the road to success and yet continued to roll through this as he toured extensively and released new albums on a regular basis. In 1994 Alce had released his first concept album since “DaDa” in 1983 called “The Last Temptation” on Epic Records and toured to support it. However, after this he asked to be released from his contract with the label so that he could sign with Hollywood Records. Bob Pfeiffer, who had originally signed him to Epic Records prior to the release of the “Trash” album, had just become the President of Hollywood Records, and in the words of those closest to him, Alice ‘just wanted to go where his friends are’. This was agreed to, but it also coincided with the longest stretch between albums of Alice’s career to that point. Six years stretched between “The Last Temptation” and his next studio release.
He had not been inactive during that period. He still toured every year, and on the back of this released his live album “A Fistful of Alice” in 1997, along with a best of retrospective over four CDs “The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper”, which also contained his authorised biography called “Alcohol and Razor Blades, Poison and Needles: The Glorious Wretched Excess of Alice Cooper, All-American".
The period between albums had seen that big change in the music scene that I have often warbled on about that occurred in the 1990’s. From the end of grunge to the beginnings of alternative that was happening in 1994, music in the heavier genre had morphed into several strands such as nu-metal, industrial metal, alternative metal and the like. And the one thing Alice Cooper had always been exceptionally good at was either flowing with the musical trends, or creating the musical trends. But six years is a long time to be out of the game recording wise, and the drastic changes in the music scene were exactly that – drastic. Could Alice find a way to incorporate all of this in his own music, and once again be the creator and the conductor of the genre? Opinions will differ, but the release of “Brutal Planet” certainly raised a lot of eyebrows for a variety of reasons.

“Brutal Planet” has, for the most part, moved away from the tongue-in-cheek shock rock style that had been Alice’s modus operandi for much of the preceding 15 years for an approach that mirrors the times industrial metal sounds to address the many socio-economic attitudes that he felt were enveloping the world around him. Musically, this delivers one of the biggest changes in his illustrious career. The new sound is deceptive on first listens, it is heavier than any album he had produced to this point in time, and for some fans no doubt at first it would have felt inaccessible. But once you listen to the album a few times, it is obvious that the melodies are still there, and that lyrically he is as hard hitting as he has shown he can be in the past. It is almost as if Alice had decided Marilyn Manson had been given too much clear air in the shock rock modern metal sound, and this was his way of returning fire.
The opening riff of the title track rips out of the speakers, and while the music world had changed massively since Alice’s last released album, it hasn’t stopped him from producing an opening track that is awash in the sounds of the time. And lyrically, he is absolutely giving it to the human race, and the Christian metaphors of looking down on paradise from above while on the surface the sinful acts of man abound is hard hitting and in places cruelly succinct. The character of god is sung by Natalie Delaney who notes the beauty of the planet, while Alice tells us the home truths. More follows with a similarly heavy riff throughout, as Alice tells us all about the “Wicked Young Man” where he croons on about racial hatred and violence that is prevalent in society. But his best lyric in this song is the most apt, where the protagonist cuts through the excuses that seems to be the usual way of shredding blame from the individual and putting it back on upbringing, when Alice sings “It's not the games that I play, the movies I see, the music I dig I'm just a wicked young man”. Just so. While he continues: “I got every kind of chemical pumpin' through my head, I read Mein Kampf daily just to keep my hatred fed, I never ever sleep I just lay in my bed, Dreamin' of the day when everyone is dead”. The song itself channels Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie, and again is another Alice special. Then “Sanctuary” bursts out of the speakers like a bomb expldong. I can’t fault the lyrics, we all need a sanctuary, and I have my own in the metal cavern, and there is nothing I like more than blasting this song as loud as I can while sitting in there. Alice breaks down the metal anguish we can all feel at times in life as slaves to a corporate world, and gives us a great song to use as an anthem against it with frenzied intensity.
The social themes that Alice is funnelling through here come quick and fast as the album continues. “Blow Me Away” settles on bigotry and intolerance of race, colour and creed, things that are obviously things on Alice’s mind. “Eat Some More” attacks the wanton waste of food in the western world while people starve to death in other places around the world. “Pick up the Bones” is Alice’s victims of war song, and is not for the faint hearted. He sings: “There are forces in the air, Ghosts in the wind, Some bullets in the back and some scars on the skin. There were demons with guns who marched through this place, killing everything that breathed they're an inhuman race”. Alice is not mucking around on this album. It may have been six years since his previous release, and this one is as hard hitting lyrically on a number of issues as the increase in heaviness of the music. There’s nothing light hearted about this album.
“Pessi-Mystic” opens up side two of the album in the same sort of depressingly fatalistic language, with Alice ranting on the constant harking on bad news and death and destructive ways of the world around us, especially during what comprises the chorus with “I'm pessimystic, I'm so fatalistic, I'm pessimystic, I don't believe a thing, I'm pessimystic, I'm so nihlistic, I'm pessimystic, Of what tomorrow brings”. It is amazing how much of what Alice talks about n this album from 25 years ago is suddenly so relevant all over again. Taken the next song "Gimme" as another example. The promises offered by politicians and companies on the same level, that they can solve all of your worldly problems, highlighting how so many people feel they are being hard done by and that they deserve more for doing nothing, which they will get simply for their loyalty. Or so they believe. “It’s the Little Things” is the closest to recent history Alice Cooper lyric wise you are going to get, name checking snatches of lyrics and song names from the past incorporated into the track to create his story. Then “Take it Like a Woman” is a modern take on his classic ballad “Only Women Bleed”, following the same story of domestic violence of women that he harped on in that song. There is a similar structure to the way the track is crafted but with the modern musical style adopted for it, a little like “Might as Well Be on Mars” from the “Hey Stoopid” album. The song is a good one but is the most diversified compared to the other tracks on the album. The album finishes off with an Alice classic crafting, “Cold Machines” a science fiction love story of unrequited love, stuck in the future and treated like the title Cold Machines. Like everything else on this album, it has been crafted to suit the time, musically especially but with songs and lyrics that delve far deeper than Alice Cooper albums had done for almost two decades. Some may have not enjoyed the change, but others like me found it to be a refreshing and enjoyable change.

As will be obvious to those that listen on a regular basis to this podcast, my introduction to Alice Cooper came through his latter 80’s albums that were released around the time I made my entry into the hard rock and heavy metal arena, especially the albums “Constrictor” and “Raise Your Fist and Yell”. Alice had made his comeback to music and was coming from a new direction – not for the first time in his career – and it grabbed me from the start. From those albums onwards, I was always one of the first in line to get each new release as it came out. This one of course had been quite the wait, coming six years after “The Last Temptation” which I had enjoyed thoroughly when it came out. However, like surely every other Alice Cooper fan in existence, I was completely unprepared for what awaited me when this album finally hit the shelves.
I didn’t get “Brutal Planet” on the day of its release. At the time we were furiously saving to buy a house, and any frivolous spending on albums was paused for a time. It wasn’t until about six months later that I got it, and it was within a month of moving into the first house we ever bought, so it is eternally tied to that time of my life for me. So we’ve moved into our new home, and I finally have Alice Cooper’s latest album, and I put it on. And in one of those moments that very occasionally came to me through my life of listening to music – I thought I had been given the wrong album. That first riff that comes out of the speakers is unlike anything I had heard from Alice in his career. It was, as the title suggests, brutal. And then the rest of the album that follows, it was a real game changer. Alice had changed as circumstances required over the years, but surely never in such a massive way than this. This was going to take some time to process, but it was something I looked forward to doing! And the more I listened to the album the more I enjoyed it. To be fair it was of a style of that I was always going to enjoy, and though a lot of Alice Cooper enthusiasts (mostly those that had come on board in the “Trash” era) had some trouble accepting what had been offered, I was more than happy with what Alice had come up with.
Flash forward to the present, and how does the album stand up today? I have had this album back out and playing over the last couple of weeks, indeed my vinyl version that I have just recently been able to pick up along the way. And it has been just as exciting and intriguing and thought provoking as it was 25 years ago. It is of its time, but is such a significant change to what Alice had done, really at any point in his career to this time. Shock rock, new wave, hard rock and hair metal and even bordering on metal at times, but never to the point he and his band reach on this album. It’s quite a statement, and one that seems less endearing to most of his fan base. But to me, like everything else he had done, it is essentially Alice Cooper, and I still think this is a wonderful album.
More was to come, as Alice always seemed to pair up his albums nicely, which was good news for fans such as me. And his ability to continue to not only move with the times but even be ahead of the curve remains intact for yet another era of music through his long reign as the king of us who are not worthy.