matzaballman's Full Review: Pretties For You by Alice Cooper
One bad thing about hard to find albums is that most of the time you're paying the extra bucks for how rare the album is and not for the quality of the music itself. Such is the case of the debut album by Alice Cooper called Pretties For You, which I think is the strangest thing that Alice and his original group ever did, solo or apart. But...before I get to that, let me say some positive things about Pretties For You.
For one, I absolutely love the cover, which I find hilarious. It is a painting of a grumpy, middle age business man with a mug of beer snarling at a pretty young lady who is lifting up her dress and showing him her panties. There is also an ice cream sundae along with some miniature oriental looking building in the background. The back cover shows the original Alice Cooper group (Neil Smith, Glen Buxton, Alice Cooper, Dennis Dunaway and Michael Bruce) posing in an art museum. Alice himself, by the way, is the guy in the middle with long blond wavy hair and a look of wonder on his face!
Two, I love the strange, bizarro song titles. Only the most grumpy and humorless person could not love such song titles such as No Longer Umpire, Sing Low Sweet Cheerio, 10 Minutes Before The Worm, Earwigs To Eternity, B.B. On Mars and Today Mueller. The rest of the songs are...
Titanic Overture, Living, Fields Of Regret, Levity Ball, Reflected, Apple Bush, Changing Arranging...
And, if you think the song titles are odd, wait (or don't wait) until you hear the songs themselves. Oh yes, the songs....
I have had this album for some 20 years now and I have never been able to make sense of most of the songs. These guys had a million ideas, they just had no clue how to put them together and develop them into listenable and coherent songs. And they had no idea how to properly play their instruments yet. The playing, both the guitar playing and drumming, are beyond sloppy.
I could tolerate all these negative things if the production were (was?) any good, but unfortunately, it's not. This is a horrible sounding album. The drums and the cymbals are too loud at times, the guitars have an over- abundance of fuzz and distortion on them, etc..Though the group is listed as producing it themselves, in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy, rhythm guitarist/keyboardist Michael Bruce (who also sang the occasional lead vocal or two on the first two A.C. albums) claims that Ian Underwood helped produce the album, but chose not to be credited. If this is true, then you can't blame him, though I wouldn't necessarily take everything in Bruce's book to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me dog.
Okay, so what exactly does this sound like? Imagine, if you can, The Beatles around the time of Sgt. Pepper, combined with Pink Floyd/Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, throw in a little of Ted Nugent and The Amboy Dukes, along with a touch of Frank Zappa and early Rolling Stones. This is psychedelic rock made by Martians. Alice hadn't developed his soon to be trademark snarl and crunch voice or developed his Alice persona yet. There are no scary, theatrical songs here, though there is one tune, Levity Ball, which was inspired by the classic, black and white horror flick Carnival Of Souls. It's all kind of charming in it's own unique way, though not very listenable. If one expects to hear something like I'm Eighteen or School's Out or even Halo Of Flies, they will be disappointed, though if one expects to hear Elected, they will find a curious song that rhymes with it and has the same melody during the verses called Reflected.
It's all not all bad, however. The album gets off to an alien start with the minute and a half, pipe organ instrumental Titanic Overture, perhaps the most musical thing here. 10 Minutes Before The Worm starts off with what my brother Fartzarellah says 'sounds like squirrels or chipmunks eating Captain Crunch cereal'. If I were to pick a favorite song from Pretties For You , this would be it, just for the unintentional silliness of it, and the slowed down ending, with the band singing in unison 'Everything is standing still...ill..ill'. Acoustic guitar starts off Sing Low, Sweet Cheerio and Alice gets a chance to blow on his harmonica a bit.
Beyond 'Sing Low', well, I can't say too much about the rest of the songs w/o listening to them, and I'd rather not do that again! Let's just say there are a few other little things that stand out. I love the refrain for Living, a guitar lick that would later appear in the song Killer pops up someplace on the first half, and there are occasional glimpses of the greatness that would later appear after they hooked up with Bob Ezrin.
If you need to have every album that Alice Cooper has done, or you are really curious to see what Alice looks like with blond hair (and I hope you aren't!!), then Pretties For You is recommended. I don't hate it. And I certainly prefer it to Al's hair metal years of the mid to late 80's and early 90's. But I also can't find myself listening to it for pleasure. Two stars. Sorry, Alice!
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.