Release Date: Jul 29, 2008
Genre(s): Rock, Metal
Record label: Steamhammet
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Throughout his long career, Alice Cooper has taken full advantage of how concept albums allow for more ambitious songwriting and memorable, layered characters who get more than one song to tell their stories. They're always tortured stories with social outcasts rebelling against turbulent childhoods or other traumatic whatnot, but this time the stakes are much higher. Along Came a Spider tells the story of an eccentric serial killer who suffers from the exact opposite of arachnophobia and lives by the spider's code of "You trap, you kill, you eat.
Golf addict Alice Cooper has dragged himself away from the fairway just long enough to make his 25th album and re-establish his shock rock roots. Revolving around the comic book crimes of a serial killer called Spider, who cuts off one leg from each of his female victims then binds their bodies in silk, it's as close to his 70s heyday as Cooper has come in decades, the metal guitars glinting against a wash of soaring pop choruses. His snarl and sneer intact, Cooper stalks the streets for prey in I Know Where You Live and The One That Got Away, though power ballads Killed By Love and Salvation are infinitely more scary.
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