Alice Cooper. The Revenge of Alice Cooper. They horrified Mary Whitehouse and delighted Salvador Dali with their theatrical blend of shock rock and horror imagery. Now in their late 70s, and 50 years after they split up, the original Alice Cooper Band are back together. Alice has reunited with guitarist Michael Bruce, bass-player Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith – the School’s Out team. Even late lead guitarist Glen Buxton appears – the rock ’n’ rolling What Happened To You, features his unreleased guitar part. Age has not withered the band. This album – their first since 1973’s Muscle Of Love – is awash with euphoric confidence. They kick off with the venomous Black Mamba, a spine-chilling scene-setter which begins with Alice creepily reciting: “I think I’ll hide within your bedsheets, coiled into the folds of white. I’ll just watch you while you’re sleeping…and decide if I should bite”, before the song uncoils, surging into mid-paced menace, with a guest appearance from Robby Krieger, former guitarist with The Doors. Wild Ones, a driving riff-fuelled rocker inspired by Brando’s 1953 film, is even better, a blistering celebration of youthful rebellion – ‘We are the wild ones, crashin’ through the night…’ Rolling thunder indeed. Both Alice and Bruce’s guitar snarl gloriously. Cynics might say the only reason men their age would be Up All Night is a wonky prostate but if you suspend belief, it could be the 1970s again. The songs are solid – there’s the menacing off-kilter nightmare of Kill The Flies, the Tarantino horror of One Night Stand and the slightly incongruous, relatively jaunty What A Syd which sounds made for musical theatre. Crap That Gets In Your Way recalls the Kinks. Other highs include the heavier, Hollywood-disecting Famous Face, garage rocker Money Screams which bounces along with neat lead, and upbeat foot-tapper Inter Galactic Vagabond Blues. On See You On The Other Side, Alice tips his showman’s top hat to lost gods of rock. Let’s hope he doesn’t join them any time soon. We get 14 songs and the box set adds two rarities, including a long-lost 1970 version of Return Of The Spiders. Welcome (back) to their nightmare.
Paul Weller. Find El Dorado. Weller is in a reflective mood on a melancholy album of covers including Ray Davies’s Nobody’s Fool (TV’s Budgie theme) and Bobby Charles’s mellow country rocker Small Town Talk. Best are Pinball, Brian Protheroe’s list of moans (a minor 1975 hit), which gets a jazzy-folk vibe; and Merle Haggard’s White Line Fever – a gentle country paean to the addictive loneliness of touring. The morose Modfather duets with Robert Plant on Clive’s Song, written by the Incredible String Band’s Clive Palmer.
Madonna. Veronica Electronica. Her Ray Of Light album was a thrilling futuristic reinvention. These 8 club remixes undermine it. The mesmerising vision of those arty 1998 songs is drowned by heavy-handed, over-thumping reworkings. Tracks like Skin, once sublime and trippy, and the haunting Drowned World lose all their subtle magic. It’s like taking a hammer to a cut-glass figurine. Available on silver vinyl as fool’s gold wasn’t available.
Jesse Murph. Sex Hysteria. Don’t be fooled by the Alabama twang. Murph, 20, is influenced by modern pop as much as country. Especially on Blue Stripes which opens acapella before morphing into a soulful genre-blend with distorted bass and Spector-like drums. Songs like Touch Me Like A Gangster are sultry and sexually confident. ‘This bed ain’t gon’ break itself,’ she tells a lover. Quite. Effort required.