The Best Of Alice Cooper: Mascara & Monsters

 (71 customer reviews)

Yes I, like you, still love Alice Cooper to death. I bought all of the albums by the Alice Cooper Group (including "Easy Action and "Pretties For You"), saw them live a bunch of times, even covered "Be My Lover" in a band when I was 17 years old.This is definitely a better collection than any released so far, including the box set. Problem is, it reminds you of the fact that Alice had "it" through "School's Out", and then pretty much lost it until the brand new one (which is amazing). The CD sort of evolves like this: Cuts 1 through 11 get you jumping all over the room with joy, then everything sort of falls apart until, strangely, "Clones" and "Poison". Maybe it's the fact that Alice wanted so badly during the period of cuts 12 through 20 to be "legit", playing golf with Bing Crosby and all, that the songs just weren't Alice anymore. You wind up wanting to hear "Raped n' Freezin'", "Black...Read more

This is an expanded edition of the classic 74 album, Greatest Hits. Rhino has added 10 songs from that edition: one pre-74 cut, "Generation Landslide" and 9 post 74 songs. They've also ditched the cover that graced the Greatest Hits album, but they have improved the sound from that CD. There are those who believe Cooper slipped after 1974, and have always believed that the Greatest Hits album was the best chronicle of the band's peak years. True, the majority of hits from the late 70's are ballads like "I Never Cry", "Only Women Bleed" and "You and Me", but these slower hits were guilty pleasures for me, so their inclusion doesn't bother me, but the rock and rollers who don't like the slower cuts might want to stick with the original, glorious and kick-ass Greatest Hits. Rhino has balanced the ballads by adding rockers like "Department of Youth", "Generation Landslide" , "Welcome To My Nightmare" and the...Read more

Alice Cooper's career divides neatly into two distinct phases. There was Alice Cooper the band, which defined the shock rock genre from 1969 to 1974 and released classic albums like Killer and Love It To Death. Then there was Alice Cooper the solo artist, who would schmooze with celebrities on the golf course and make appearances on Hollywood Squares. The former was a terrific band and I saw them twice in the early Seventies when I was in college. The latter didn't hold my interest much--though "Only Women" and "I Never Cry" were pleasant, if somewhat wimpy, ballads.When his box set came out last year, I was disappointed by how little attention was given to his early-Seventies glory years with the Alice Cooper band. So even when BMG offered it at an amazing discount, I passed. Instead, I stuck with my vinyl copies of his albums and a cassette copy of Greatest Hits. This new release, however, makes a nice addition to my CD collection. It completely...Read more