Band:	Alice Cooper
Album:	School's Out
Style:	Hard rock, Glam rock
Release date:	June 30, 1972
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. School's Out
02. Luney Tune
03. Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets
04. Street Fight
05. Blue Turk
06. My Stars
07. Public Animal No. 9
08. Alma Mater
09. Grand Finale

"She wanted an Einstein, but she got a Frankenstein." Here's Alice Cooper, in almost as pure a spirit as the band ever recorded. Boasting one of rock music's most timeless and enduring singles as its opening gambit, School's Out constitutes a vital piece of Alice's legacy, shepherding the band toward bigger success and codifying an important thematic preoccupation: not knowing how to rhyme.

Alice Cooper made their first money on "I'm Eighteen", a single that encapsulated the frustrating uncertainties of abandoning adolescence and ascending to adulthood. This restless mood is the place of greatest comfort and relevance for Alice Cooper, and School's Out hones in on it to explore those follies in greater detail, inventing in the process a lighter, more playful sense of defiance than what was broached earlier, what is now one of Alice Cooper's defining personality traits. It's a loose concept album, the first of many that have populated the career of Alice the person, and it dials back the odometer from "I'm Eighteen" just a smidge, returning to the days of formal education, when the questions were not quite as existential but still loomed large to their subjects. School's Out is all about cheating on tests, carving dirty words in desks, getting into fights, being a cat - it's a summation of school-aged rebellion, with dashes of ferocious emotional turmoil and wistful reflection to balance out the whimsy.

Of course, the ceremony begins with the title track. No rock song ever dared with quite this much humor and sympathy to give voice to the impatience, the impertinence, and the inarticulate desire to break the rules known by every child who ever chafed under a teacher's gaze and every teen who ever found class a dead-end drag. It's a simple, snarly sing-along, and all it does is mark the onset of summer vacation, but the sense of wild, giddy freedom is a glimpse of what for a certain slice of one's life is the highest form of truth. School sucks. Adults forget that. This is a song that expresses, in raucous and jubilant chorus, the joy of all children and reminds adults to be grateful that they're not in school anymore. Now if only Alice could write a song telling me I don't have to go to work anymore.

School's Out has as monumental a start as could be wished for. Yet that song is the only widely known track from this album, the only one to receive any regular representation live; as soon as the bells warp out of earshot, the album proceeds with the anxious groove of "Luney Tune" and departs from the sense of pure fun. "Luney Tune" shuffles in sour tones through a tale of ill-fated madness, the album's closest relative to earlier macabre tales like "Halo Of Flies" and "Black Juju" - an overlooked favorite of mine, but an odd duck to take second billing. It slinks into "Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets", an alley-cat comedy piece that morphs into a bizarre rendition of West Side Story's "Jet Song" and then into the frantic, skittering bass of "Street Fight" before the album slows to recline in the cool, jazzy, but still mildly morbid swing of "Blue Turk". "Blue Turk" is another sorely underappreciated piece, one whose exchange of trombone and saxophone solos, loungey hook, and light touch of gothic poetry mark it as a distinctly entertaining bit of experimentation. From there, the dizzying piano of "My Stars" takes over with a contrast of ascending and descending melodies and some sizzling tonal tension. "Public Animal No. 9" is the most straightforward rock number on the album, but it fades into the distant melancholy of "Alma Mater", a nostalgic reflection on the end of school days that contrasts the celebratory opener. "Grand Finale" is what it says on the package.

By the end, School's Out shows itself to be varied tonally and stylistically, so much so that each individual track deserves some kind of notation. The album shifts away from the pure garage feeling of Love It To Death and Killer and toward a larger, more dramatic, more symphonic production. Brass and woodwinds surface all over the album, most prominently in those midsection solos of "Blue Turk"; keys drive a great deal of melody as well, whether as laser-beam synths or funky rock'n'roll piano clatter; the contrasts between bright guitar leads and Alice's coarse shouts sound more purposefully orchestrated, with some nice textural interplay found throughout. If this album belongs to any one member in particular, it's Dennis Dunaway - his crisp, snappy bass playing leads off half the tracks on the album, and he can always be heard rumbling underneath as a powerful accent or a creative riff. Overall, this might be the most instrumentally impressive expression of the original Alice Cooper band short of Billion Dollar Babies.

In spite of its sense of adventure and some genuinely strong cuts, School's Out often feels like a dry run for Billion Dollar Babies and Welcome To My Nightmare, where the symphonic approach would become further refined and the straight rock numbers would become tighter, catchier, and more interesting. Compare "My Stars" with the song "Billion Dollar Babies" - they share a profile, but the latter climbs to a whole new plane. The sudden shift after the opening track can also serve to confuse the mood of the album, which never fully returns to the joy of the beginning even as it continues contemplating the trials of school days. Considering that it lacks any single as obvious as "School's Out" (which was, in fact, its only single) and that it was wedged between some of the greatest proto-metal and classic rock albums of all time, it's easy to view this quirky, unusual album as a lesser work. Over the years, my experience with it has largely been ambivalent; sometimes I find it strangely underappreciated, other times it appears marred by inconsistent experiments. Of the four great classics produced by the Alice Cooper band, this is the one I revisit the least - there is no denying it is the weakest of the bunch. But it is a classic and I do revisit it, and ultimately it does deserve more holistic recognition.