For being a brat refusing to act your age

Alice Cooper - Welcome to my Nightmare - 1975
Alice Cooper - Goes to Hell - 1976

Or maybe I should say: Welcome to my confusion.
I can't believe that I let the whole 1975 go by without realising that I was missing this album. I should have suspected something from the fact that there was no Alice Cooper at all that year. And a year is not a year if there wasn't an Alice album!
It's actually not too bad a thing that I missed Nightmare, because there are a few things in common between the two albums, so it almost makes sense to write about them together.
There are two things that you notice as soon as you listen to these albums: The first one is the music. The sound and style in these two is much "cleaner" than before, less gritty than the band's albums. I wrote "cleaner", like that, between quotation marks, because Alice can never be clean, but they definitely sound less like garage rock.
The other thing is that both albums can be loosely viewed as concept albums. And in both cases, the concept is related to his made-up character, Steven. Steven is a kid that will appear not only in these two albums but in many more, all the way till this very decade (I mean this one, the 2010s). Alice claims he took the idea of having a recurring character from Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, and any reference to Mr. Vonnegut is good enough for me. It's not too clear, though, if Steven is really a child, a man thinking of his childhood, or one personality of many of a murderer (the last one seems to make more sense).
In Welcome to my Nightmare, the concept is, yes, you guessed correctly, Steven's nightmares. Goes to Hell gets much better, since it's a sort of bizarro Inferno, in which Steven is sleeping and follows Alice down an endless staircase, and they are in hell, which seems to be some sort of Disco hell (Disco Inferno? There's a song in Saturday Night Fever called that, I'm sure). The devil is a DJ that talks a lot like Barry White. And really, a concept like that is worth the price of admission.
Nightmare is a bit of a more solid album, with hardly any bad tracks, and many that were huge hits and that he's played live for a very long time, from the title track, to the ballad "Only Women Bleed", and some of my favourite Alice tracks, like "Cold Ethyl", "Steven", or "The Black Widow". As I said, it may be a bit cleaner than his previous releases, but it doesn't lose an inch of energy, weirdness, or horror.
Goes to Hell is a bit weaker, I think. I actually find it much funnier with respect to the lyrics, and moments like the "dialogue" between the protagonist and the Devil in "Give the kid a break" (Alice: "For Heaven's sake" / Barry White-like Devil: "Watch your language, kid!"), never fail to make me laugh. But there aren't any of the great songs of the previous albums here. Still, I like this one also a lot.
In sum, two really cool albums by the always cool Alice.

• "The Black Widow" has an awesome spoken intro by the absolute master of horror, Vincent Price. It's brilliant and hilarious, and if it wasn't because there's not much to be found by Alice on Youtube, that would be my choice for today. 
• I don't know what's creepier: if Alice singing with a childlike voice in "Years Ago", or "Steven", with its "You only lived a minute of your life / I must be dreaming, please stop screaming". 
• The title of this entry is from "Go to Hell". Being a brat refusing to act one's age apparently sends you to hell. Oh, well....
• "I'm the Coolest", from Goes to Hell, has the lines: "I mean, I gotta be the greatest / I'm just a ball of fun / I mean, I'm definitely the greatest / I'm also the coolest". I'm trying to keep this as apolitical as possible, but I can't help but think of a certain current President from a certain country in the north of the Americas...
• I'm putting the title track from Nightmare and "Give the kid a break" from Goes to Hell. Neither is really my favourite, but I do like both a lot and the former is from The Muppet's Show, and the latter is just as bizarre as it should be. 

Starship appears upon our sphere

Klaatu - 3:47 EST - 1976

I don't even know where to begin here. I am actually quite fascinated by this band. I'm not sure if their music is good, I think it is. But their story, which was completely new to me, and how strange they are, is something I can't resist.
Klaatu were a Canadian band from the mid to late 1970s. The name of the band, in case you don't know, is the name of the alien that visited Earth in the 1951 classic movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. That is, already, enough to draw my attention, because I have always loved the movie.
The name of this album is a further reference to the movie, one so obscure that even I wouldn't have caught it without Wikipedia: it's the exact time at which Klaatu arrived in our planet in the movie.
But it gets better. When they released this album, they decided not to put any information about them whatsoever. No pictures, no names, all songs were written by "Klaatu". Now, their music style is a weird mixture of psychedelic, progressive, rock and pop. And yes, they do sound a bit like The Beatles in their later days. So, because of their sound, together with the lack of info in the album, someone asked the question "Are they the Beatles?". After that, the rumours started spreading, and Capitol, their label did what the CIA would do: they neither confirmed nor denied. I had never heard about any of this, but it seems that for a good while they were very successful. Until, of course, they came out and confirmed they were not The Beatles.
On top of that, I actually have enjoyed this album a lot. It's a bit of a throwback to the 60s, but not really. They do sound exactly like you would expect a 1970's band that sounded a bit like the 60s. You have to listen to them, but if I had to give a description, I would say they sound like a cross between Slade, Queen and Beatles circa 1968.
There's their next album coming up soon. I'm really looking forward to it.

• If you look them up in Youtube, you'll find most of the songs from this album. You'll also find a lot of references to this, and all others, Beatles related conspiracy theories. 
• The opening track is called "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft". Apparently, the title comes from an actual event: In the 1950s, an association called "International Flying Saucer Bureau" (really, you have to love that name) decided to run an experiment called "World Contact Day". The idea was to collectively send a telepathic message to aliens. The message started with what would be the song title. 
• The title of this section is from "Sub-Rosa Subway". But it's not really from the lyrics, but part of a message in Morse code that appears halfway through the song. Seriously, I love these guys!
• Other song titles here include gems such as "Doctor Marvello", "Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III" or "Little Neutrino". They're also great songs. 
• But if I have to choose one, not necessarily a song, but a title, without a doubt I'm choosing "Anus of Uranus". I can't even type it without laughing. The song is pretty cool too, so here it goes. Also, I found a fan video that has excerpts from Back to the Future. Can't get better than that. But look these guys up, they're very cool!