Let the show begin, I am ready

Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies - 1973

Another week, another year, another Alice Cooper album.
In a weird way, this was an album that, as a whole, went quite under the radar for me. Don't get me wrong, I've played most of its songs a lot of times, I just don't think I was fully aware that those songs were in this album, if that makes sense.
The first thing that struck me, while listening to it again, is how damn good this album sounds, especially in comparison with the band's previous releases. The sound is crispy, clean, and still it doesn't one single bit of raw energy.
Of course, this one is the classic "horror rock" album, if there's such a thing, and the subject matters of the darker songs range from sexual assault to necrophilia, not forgetting fear of..... dentists. And everything always with the tongue-in-cheek quality that Alice always adds to his singing. Because of it, reading the lyrics is always a much inferior experience to actually listening to them,
And while maybe there's not any one song that can be as strong as "School's Out" was, there are a lot of real great classics, such as the title track, "No More Mr. Nice Guy", and "Elected".
So, great sound, lots of horror and fun, and a lot of excellent tunes make this one a great album that I'm very glad I rediscovered.

• If you were puzzled about the fear of dentists, I was referring to "Unfinished Sweet", that includes lines such as: "He says my teeth are OK but my gums gotta go". 
• Chris Cornell from Soundgarden used to love this album. He tells that in high school, the teachers would allow them to pick an album to play and he took this one. They didn't allow him to play it. About it he said: "It was then I knew that rock'n'roll could scare the fuck out of certain people". Wise words.
• "I love the dead" is creepier than "Dead Babies", and that's a tall order. At least "Dead Babies" is a metaphor about child neglect. This one, instead, is about, well, loving the dead. 
• After a bit of thought, I decided to go for the title track to share here, mostly because this live version, if from a much later time, is brilliant. I love the song too, that helped. 

You know they won't come home tonight

Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy - 1973

A while back, probably even writing about their very first album, I said how listening to them gave me the feeling that these guys did exactly whatever the hell they wanted, without ever seeming too worried about what anybody would think of their material.

And there's probably no finer example than this album. After the massive success and respect earned from their previous album, it would probably be way too easy to do a sort of follow up. Not them. They simply went pretty much in the opposite direction and changed gears so completely that it's quite astonishing. And deserving quite a lot of respect for that.
But not much more than that, in my opinion. 

It's not so much their experimenting with funk ("The Crunge") or reggae ("D'yer Mak'er") that bothers me. I mean, that's not really too good, but it's not the worst for me. What really bothers me is the layer upon layer of guitar overdubs, the Mellotron, and the overall lack of energy in the album. It's as if they had all taken sleeping pills when recording it. 

The thing that annoys me is that I can recognise here the beginnings of some ideas that they would return to in a couple of years for Physical Graffiti, but it's as if these were pretty bad drafts of what they would do later. 

So far, my least favourite LZ album. As simple as that.

• About their experimentation, "The Crunge" is actually pretty bad. I will from now on personally refer to it as "The Cringe". "D'yer Mak'er" is a bit silly, and exactly what you would expect of LZ doing reggae, but it's much better. 
• When I was listening earlier today, and heard the first track, "The Song Remains the Same", for a second I thought there was something wrong with my version, that it was too fast or something. I now read that they actually sped up Robert Plant's track. Yes, They sped Robert Plant up. He literally sounds like the chipmunks in parts. Why, oh why.
• I'm leaving "No Quarter" here. It's not a difficult choice, I think it's by far the best song in the album. I found this live version, still heavy on keyboards, but at least the vocals aren't drowned in effects, and Page's solo is brilliant.