Album Guide

PRESS RELEASE:

Dada is:

A) What babies call their daddies.

B) An art movement of the early 20th century that stressed the mysterious, dreamlike and absurd aspects of existence.

C) Alice Cooper's 17th album for Warner Bros. Records.

D) All of the above.

If you guessed (D), then you're ready for one of the most macabre, compelling and sheerly entertaining new albums of the current rock and roll season. Dada is indeed Alice Cooper's 17th Warner Bros. LP — nine original new songs that together comprise the latest installment in Alice's continuing collection of inventive short-stories-in-sound. Dada is a multi-layered tour-de-force, a tale of twisted love and strange devotion evoking the surreal intensity of the dada sensibility through the eyes of Alice's most bizzare cast of characters ever.

Dada also marks the auspicious reunion of Alice and producer Bob Ezrin — ace knob turner on such landmark albums as Killer, School's Out, Love It To Death, and the towering Billion Dollar Babies. Joining Ezrin and Alice in Toronto (where Dada was recorded) is another veteran of Alice's astonishing career — session man par excellence Dick Wagner, who contributed electrifying licks to a pivotal LP in the Cooper catalog, Welcome To My Nightmare. Wagner, who plays guitar on Dada, is joined by one other Nightmare alumnus, bassist Prakash John, who along with drummer Richard Kolinka from the popular French band, Telephone, provide a solid rhythmic underpinning to the proceedings. With Wagner and Ezrin (who handles keyboard chores on the LP) writing melodies to Alice's decidedly dark and compelling lyrics, Dada harks back to some of rock's finest moments while at the same time hinting at the shape of modern music's future.

In songs such as "Dyslexia," (Dada's debut single), the chilling "Fresh Blood,” and the album's conceptual centerpiece, "Pass The Gun Around," Alice is in top form, unraveling the story of one Former Lee Warmer, a character fresh from the fertile imagination of one of rock's most inventive writers and performers. A contemporary passion play, Dada traffics in unknowns and forbiddens — spinning, along the way, a shadowy fable of broken taboos and terrible secrets. Dada stands among Alice's most assured and mature works, where music and words mesh with meaning to create a haunting allegory of the dark sides in all of us.

Dada continues a tradition of powerful, evocative rock music from an artist whose vision is as dangerous as it is original.