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Kerrang!
November 1981

Author: Sandy Robertson

Striktly For Konnoisseurs

Alice Cooper
'Easy Action' (Straight WS 1845)

Lookit those clothes! Gold lame pants, yum-yum! Pervets. Before Alice Cooper took up celebrity golf and dried out, before he cut 'Love It To Death' even, Frank Zappa let him make a couple of albums just so Alice would quit annoying him.

And this is the better one kids. Produced by Neil Young's pal David Briggs(!), it bangs it's way around from minute to minute without a hint of direction, but is plenty revealing all the same.

This was before the guest appearances by furtive axeman Dick Wagner, so the playing is terribly puny. Alice's Sinatra predelictions are on show in 'Shoe Salesman' and the limpid 'Beautiful Flyaway' (which might be a description of the gangs hair, which has them looking like whores or afgans on the cover), and there's a little preview of the 'West Side Story' guff to come (totally uncredited) in here somewhere.

'Refrigerator Heaven' is poprock wonderwhizz, 'Return Of The Spiders' (dedicated to Gene Vincent, who would've made a great HM star) hints at the dreadful possibility for bad drumming on the mainman's just-realised mess of Love's '7 & 7 Is', and stuff like 'Below Your Means' and 'Lay Down And Die Goodbye' are overlong and boring to the point where they become brilliant.