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Alice Cooper - Killer review



Reviewer:
9.7

216 users:
8.37
Band: Alice Cooper
Album: Killer
Release date: November 1971


01. Under My Wheels
02. Be My Lover
03. Halo Of Flies
04. Desperado
05. You Drive Me Nervous
06. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
07. Dead Babies
08. Killer

In 1971, Alice Cooper released a pair of albums that helped redefine music, ushering rock'n'roll into a heavier, darker, and louder era. I have already offered my thoughts on Love It To Death, and now the time has come to examine the album's counterpart, Killer.

Killer chronicles the Alice Cooper band at its musical height, featuring some of the best performances of any Alice album throughout six decades of releases under that name. In particular, Killer hosts some of my favorite bass-playing on any album, courtesy of Dennis Dunaway's beautiful, dusky tone and limber, melodic lines of rhythm. Killer also ventures further into the black abyss than Love It To Death, as evidenced by the title alone, and the influence of these songs on heavy metal of all eras is self-evident. While songs like "Under My Wheels" and "You Drive Me Nervous" remain steadfastly upbeat even as they threaten to fly apart at the seams from sheer energy, the grim "Desperado" and positively unholy "Dead Babies" step into a different world of deathly atmosphere and creeping misery.

"Halo Of Flies," Killer's answer to Love It To Death's "Black Juju," revisits the half-focused psychedelia of the band's earliest albums, but twists the off-kilter melody and dreamy good nature of 1960s pop into something much stranger and deeper. Over eight-and-a-half minutes, "Halo Of Flies" journeys into the furthest depths of heavy music as it existed in 1971, ranging from eldritch proto-punk to crushing heavy blues that could give any Black Sabbath or Deep Purple a run for their money.

What made Alice Cooper so unique and powerful was the band's ability to write catchy, memorable tunes not too far afield from more polished, mainstream pop/rock bands, encase those songs in a volatile, rough-hewn packaging, and push the music's atmosphere from "rascally" to "demented." The title track, for example, starts off low-key and bass-driven, and aside from its sideways delivery, not entirely foreign to rock'n'roll standards. Halfway through, however, the song changes tack and becomes the soundtrack to an execution; a choir and organ mourn the soul about to depart, while the stiff, foreboding drums conduct the titular killer to the gallows. The last few seconds unleash a wild, disorienting sound apparently meant to imitate the sound of death.

"Killer" the song and Killer the album demonstrate why after all these years Alice Cooper remains one of the greatest legends of hard rock and heavy metal. Even as one of the genre's earliest visionaries, the band had numerous brushes with perfection that still send ripples through the world of heavy music today.


Rating breakdown
Performance: 10
Songwriting: 9
Originality: 9
Production: 8





Written on 02.07.2016 by I'm the reviewer, and that means my opinion is correct.


Comments

Comments: 1   Visited by: 44 users
15.07.2016 - 17:29
Rating: 8
BitterCOld
The Ancient One
I slightly prefer "Billion Dollar Babies", but both are great albums. Really enjoy Killer.

side note, was cheeky and at one point in time opted to use "Under My Wheels" as the ringtone on my work phone. You know, that whole opening line of the song... "The telephone is ringing."

BIG mistake.

began to associate the song/album with nonstop barrage of work requests, etc.
----
get the fuck off my lawn.

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