Author: BD Joyce
- Artist: Alice Cooper
- Album: Brutal Planet
- Year of Release: 2000
- Country: USA
- Label: Eagle Records
- Format: Digipack CD
- Catalogue Number: EAGCD115
Even during Alice Cooper’s lost years in the early 1980s, at the height of his substance addiction, he continued to release albums on a remarkably prolific schedule, with seven albums following 1975’s wondrous Welcome To My Nightmare in just eight years, that run ending with DaDa in 1983. However, with close to a decade separating 1991’s Hey Stoopid and 2000’s Brutal Planet, with only The Last Temptation breaking the silence in 1994, Cooper had allowed a substantial period of time to pass, during which the rock scene that he had always been part of had changed almost beyond recognition. In the intervening ten years, the tail end of hair metal had bled into alternative rock and grunge, before itself being swept away by the nu-metal that represented the most significant novel sound in mainstream rock, until several years into the 21st century. Perhaps it is this passage of time that means that the shift in sound from one album to another is the most drastic of Cooper’s career (even including the leap from the Pink Floyd-aping psychedelia of Easy Action to the streamlined hard rock of Love It To Death). Perhaps it is the same passage of time that renders this stylistic leap so difficult to digest. With The Last Temptation, Cooper had seemingly found a way of both sympathetically reconciling the various musical components of his long career, while at the same time embracing contemporary sounds in a way that suited him perfectly. This served to position him as the obvious elder statesman of an alternative rock scene that he had played a significant role in inspiring. While the shift to Brutal Planet‘s industrial-metal hybrid can be made sense of in the context of what was popular at the time, in relation to the previous album, it is difficult not to feel that Cooper has discarded something that worked far too early.
Regardless of the success of Cooper’s musical evolution here though, it is easy to understand why, in 2000, he saw the artists that he looked to for sonic inspiration – primarily Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson (pre- the horrific revelations of recent years), and Trent Reznor – as kindred spirits. Each one of them embodied a similar anti-establishment mindset to his own, as well as being, in many respects, figures that could only ever have been created by the America that they railed so effectively against – the dark, distorting mirror image of a culture that is both piously conservative, and richly decadent. The logic of gravitating towards the crunching industrial-metal sound of the aforementioned artists is understandable, but the pitfall of arriving at this particular sonic choice is that Brutal Planet found itself almost immediately dated, as the world of mainstream rock and metal moved on quickly from the constraints of an especially rigid variant. While the elemental nature of hard rock means that plugging a Les Paul into a Marshall and crunching out a distorted chord will continually renew itself, facilitating a kind of agelessness, the speed at which electronic music moves and develops, and the almost unlimited possibilities offered by computer software ensures that Brutal Planet will forever be trapped in a turn of the century time capsule, and this forms a sonic barrier that it can be a challenge to penetrate, in search of the songs that lie on the other side.
Perhaps this criticism is overly harsh though, as the songs are indeed there, once the listener has come to terms with the unfortunate production with which Cooper has saddled himself. Unsurprisingly, the best moments on the album come when shards of sweet melody are propelled like shrapnel into the turgid grind of much of the album. The most obvious such highlight comes three songs deep, in the shape of ‘Sanctuary’. Arguably the speediest track that Cooper has ever put his name to, the chugging guitars of the verse threaten to invade the borders of thrash, and the energy is infectious. Equally as addictive is the sugar rush of a genuinely thrilling chorus, and the combination of stacked harmonies with the extremity of the musical accompaniment offers a signpost towards what might have been a better album, had Cooper chosen this path throughout. It was around this time that Ginger Wildheart spoke of writing a number of songs for Alice Cooper, none of which made it onto this, or any other record, even if the demos are but a click away online. Wildheart writing songs for one of his primary influences should have been a happy marriage, but sadly the submission of his offering coincided with probably the only period in Cooper’s career that their styles were not complementary. One mentions this because, curiously, ‘Sanctuary’ could not sound any more Wildhearts if it were holding a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale while being pumped full of illegal drugs, despite the fact that Ginger’s fingerprints are nowhere to be seen. One can only wonder what might have been, but at the very least, ‘Sanctuary’ provides a compelling reason for the existence of an album that would otherwise not be hugely missed, were it not to exist.
The sudden excellence of ‘Sanctuary’ though, underscores one of the most striking characteristics of Brutal Planet, as well as being another entry into the exhaustive list of reasons why it is fundamentally such a mediocre album. Despite the huge departure from the rest of his discography that the majority of the album represents, Cooper uncharacteristically fails to wholly commit to his new direction. While this provides some much needed variety across a sometimes one-paced collection of songs, the fact that those tracks that are the least typical of the overall sound generate by far the most enjoyment is rather damning of the quality of those that occupy much of the run time. Joining ‘Sanctuary’ in the credit column is the excellent ‘Eat Some More’. A swampy, roiling riff suggests that Cooper has at least a passing familiarity with the mid-to-late 1990s output of Corrosion Of Conformity and Down, and the thick guitar tone, augmented by a booming low-end only goes to show what is missing from an album that relies to hard on a thin and grating guitar tone. A woozy psychedelic edge adds a does of prime Alice In Chains, and the whole thing is a cohesive triumph that poses a still-unanswered ‘What if…?’, adrift on a sea of ‘Will this do?’ Unsurprisingly, like Ozzy Osbourne and the Beatles pastiche that invariably appears once on every release, Alice can’t stop himself from disconnecting the sequencer for the duration of a single hair-metal ballad, and although ‘Take It Like A Woman’ is some way short of his best work, the comparative melodic riches, and simplicity of the stark piano and strings accompaniment means that it outshines much of the rest of the album. That it awakens memories of the underrated Goes To Hell is a bonus, a bonus that allows us to overlook the well-meaning, but clumsy lyrics, in which Cooper surely means to pay tribute to the innate resilience of the female psyche, but in so doing, serves to almost glamorise the strong silence of the abused woman, rather than give her the tools to fight back with righteous fury.
Beyond the relatively scant highlights, however, we find an album that too often gets mired in mid-tempo sub-Rob Zombie murk. The grating guitar sound likely seemed futuristic at the time, but the underweight, over-processed tone only serves to rob the songs of heft and power. Similarly, the ambient sounds and electronic layers of noise that litter the worst songs on Brutal Planet no doubt intend to mimic the production of Trent Reznor or Al Jourgensen at their sophisticated, textured best, but here they are little more than superfluous, directionless frippery. The album reaches a true low point in an excruciating middle third, which contains two of Cooper’s very worst tracks. ‘Pick Up The Bones’ finds Alice Cooper discovering trip-hop half a decade after the rest of the world, and the monotonous melodies and desultory chorus are utterly dispiriting. ‘Pessi-Mystic’ is slightly brighter musically, deploying a searching guitar line that illuminates the verse, together with an adequate chorus, but the lyrics plumb the depths, in an atrocious exhibition of emotional regression. As a 52 year old Cooper repeatedly yells “Shut up, shut up”, and then uses the actual line “I’m pessimystic / I’m so pissed-off-istic”, it is difficult to identify the caricature that he has become with the sometimes brilliant lyricist of Killer and Love It To Death, the ingenious sardonic bile of a man that was once a peerless chronicler of middle America reduced to facile slogans, and pious cod-profundity of the most tedious kind.
One should not, however, be too disappointed by Brutal Planet. In a world that contains numerous excellent Alice Cooper albums, the presence of the occasional misfiring experiment can be tolerated. Indeed, one could argue that it adds a layer of intrigue and interest to a career that could so easily have faded away, in the fashion of so many of Cooper’s one-time peers. It is also all too easy to criticise the more experienced members of the rock ‘n’ roll fraternity who refuse to engage with new music, and while it is similarly simple to mock those who engage a little too readily, there is something admirable about Cooper finding something to appreciate in the music of those who were once so inspired by him. And, in the interest of fairness, we can also observe that despite this listener’s own antipathy towards much of Brutal Planet, it was not commercially unsuccessful, selling reasonably well, and bringing the man to a receptive new audience. In the final analysis though, while there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the ambition shown here, the sub-par execution means that artistically, it remains a missed opportunity, as opposed to another successful reinvention.
alifetimeofmusic 