Billion Dollar Babies (Deluxe Version)

The Alice Cooper band was one of the early ‘70s most visceral hard rock bands. Their stage show with snakes and guillotines made them notorious but it was their tunes that made them memorable. Billion Dollar Babies is their fourth and final studio album with producer Bob Ezrin, who intuitively understood how to balance the band’s theatrical flourishes with the lean, mean hard rock at their core. “Hello Hooray,” “Elected,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and the title track are further manifestations of their great relationship, tuneful yet menacing, frightening but exciting. While their singer Vincent Furnier would soon apply the Alice Cooper moniker to his solo career and turn further to shtick, here such touches as the necrophilia anthem “I Love the Dead” and the shuffling power of “Generation Landslide” sound incredibly sincere in their grandiosity. The deluxe edition is a special treat since it includes 11 cuts from the group’s 1973 tour that finally prove the group’s stage show command, along with several studio session outtakes.