This was Alice Copper (the band’s) 7th and last release. After this, the band would end and Alice Cooper the solo artist was born with the release of Welcome To My Nightmare. There was something genuinely sinister about the band in the early seventies, before the solo performances turned into a Broadway type show performance.
The album is represented in a plain brown cardboard cover to mimic the censorship of the top shelf magazines of the time. The band were actually on a roll up until this point as Killer, Schools Out, and Billion Dollar Babies were all huge sellers. This album was not as commercially successful as the others, but it’s still a great album – even though it did not contain the hit singles. Only Teenage Lament ’74 was released with little chart success.
The album does have its moments, especially on Side 2 with the title track and Working Up A Sweat – a nod to more basic times before the record company wanted all the shock songs. There is still a loose concept lyrically to go with the cover art, of sex habits of the urban masses. Fun fact: The Man With The Golden Gun was supposed to be the soundtrack to the Bond film of the same name, but they handed the song in too late so Lulu did it instead.
Personally, I prefer the band version to the solo version of Alice Cooper. I guess it had more of an impact on me when I was a kid.
8/10 from The Grooveman.
