May. 16, 2017

REVIEW – Alice Cooper: Shock-rocker still delivers killer show

SOURCE: Columbus Dispatch

By Curtis Schieber

Sunset was lovely Tuesday night, diving golden over the rear lip of the Arena District’s Express Live. As the ’80s gave way to the upper-70s, a warm bath-like ambiance fell over the neighborhood, making it a perfect night to enjoy a lazy ballgame next door.

Then Alice Cooper took the stage and all manner of mayhem broke loose.

The band’s opener “Brutal Planet” pounded at the peace with a rather indistinct contemporary metal groove, grinding mechanically around a few riffs and a streamlined bass line. Still, it provided some evidence for the Cooper’s considerable influence on metal.

As the group worked through “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Under My Wheels,” “Billion Dollar Babies,” and “Welcome To My Nightmare,” it seemed to be playing its strong suit early on. But there were to be many more, bigger hits, songs that helped define more than one decade. Songs that continue to resonate in a pop culture obsessed with zombies, vampires and killers.

Alice was there first.

If his setlist is a bit predictable and his arrangement largely lacking in spontaneity, he has a killer band that is able to rock even the listener with a long list of priors.

Key on the pounding groove, was bassist Chuck Garric and drummer Glen Sobel; as importantly, the buzz-saw rock was fueled by guitarists Ryan Roxie, Tommy Henriksen and Nita Strauss. Strauss delivered an extended solo before “Poison” that danced off the stadium lights on one side of the venue, roared up the train tracks on the other side, and went up in flames back on stage.

If the solid rock-and-roll delivered by the band — and Alice’s gruff, still-potent singing — keeps the show grounded, the well-worn theater shtick still provides considerable amusement. “Feed My Frankenstein” featured the singer mounted on an operating table, fried with electricity and then reborn as a 15-foot hulking monster.

A sequence of songs beginning with “Only Women Bleed,” wherein the singer kills his lover, continued with his incarceration in an asylum during “Ballad Of Dwight Fry” and his execution by guillotine — enacted expertly. As the arcane execution machine was rolled to center stage, the crowd raved, as if cheering the beheading of an ancient Scottish queen.