Alice Cooper - Easy Action

Alice Cooper
Easy Action


Released 1970 on Straight/Warner Bros.
Reviewed by Sylvester Smythe, 28/10/2007ce


What happens when the mix includes such disparities as The Smothers Brothers, DDT, Lucky Luciano, harassment hyper-sexualis, and perseverant arachnids? Well, an Alice Copper record. – Easy Action to be exact. Leaving behind the post-Syd Barrett era Floyd damage of its predecessor, Pretties for You, Alice & Co. miraculously hews a haughty and libidinous music into centripetal onyx slabs. No more bogus psychedelia; no more fairy-infected, Roger Zelazy’d lyrically lazy hoci-poci. – The smoke machine’s cashed out; the sequins and body paint are snacked upon; the esoteric Eastern texts are culled from their corners only to be utilized for rolling the errant spliff.
Holy God, what a kickoff. These glamour-pusses are high steppin’, replete with an ur-lyrical genius birthed from bottles like confetti coughed from a Ken Russell’d emission nocturnal.

And so what: “Mr. & Misdemeanor” chorus-lines the one-two-three to proportion disproportionate: stiletto-heels and a carapace of black patent leather – maybe a phalanx of orbicularis oris’ costumed with a nice technicolor salve of pomegranate red, thickly smirking as every jaw drops subterranean. “I know a shoe salesman,” Cooper confesses, telling us about those “track marks,” and all he can see are freckles. And then, hayzeus lord, he’s prefiguring – or predating – Ted Williams and his fat, frozen cabeza with “Refrigerator Heaven.” Packed in ice, hand-stashed, and turnin’ up the motherfuckin riffage, “Refrigerator Heaven” jumps into a jazzy humus, cymbal clicks popping up like opium poppies, guitars circling like an irate angus pissing on the muleta: The serge cloth doth surface. Woolen itched guitar insects, slides, a few Theremin strokes, crafting form from stale air; and a repetitive theme, as minimalist as a merry-go-round, but with equii animated, threatening the glue-merchant with hard heavy hooves. – Don’t forget that relativity is as porous as Eleatic ontology. A colorless, odorless, insoluble, crystalline insecticide that’s often eyed in its acronym – DDT, is – apparently – only a talking point for perfidiousness: “Go on, eat of [the] pomaceous knowledge”, a slithering Cooper seems to say; and if Easy Action is to be seen/heard as effortless eschatology – as Alice & Co. boast ostensibly, one’s only recourse is to prefigure the preternatural: the übermensch isn’t the only Big I Infallible: as Alice himself sez: “Sometimes, I just . . . can’t . . . die”.


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