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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alice Cooper's most entertaining record!, September 14, 2000
I know it might sound crazy, but I really feel that this is ALICE COOPER'S best work. I love Alice, and all of his work, but this album is so entertaningly cheesy and experimental that it just bowled me over when I finally got it a couple of months ago. The idea of production by Desmond Child (Bon Jovi), made me wary of what he'd make Alice sound like, but what he's managed to do is add the same hooky sing-along sensability that he did for Bon Jovi and Aerosmith. I know that might sound a little wrong for Alice Cooper, but give this album a chance. The big hit, "Poison", is a great, campy rocker, and virtually the entire album is wall-to-wall hooks galore. This album basically reflects Alice Cooper moving to a style somewhere between Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. The songs: "Bed of Nails", "Only my Heart Talking", "Hell is living without you" (a song co-written and backed by Bon Jovi), and "House of Fire" are all amazingly catchy, goofy songs. This album is pure trash (like the title), but trash that is supremely fun and entertaining. As great as all his early stuff is, this is the kind of album that, wall-to-wall, features songs that you will not be able to get out of your head after you listen to them. Trust me. This one may be more for 80's rock fans than ALICE COOPER purists, but anyone with an open mind will find a astoundingly catchy and fun album if they're willing to listen to it.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A SOLID ALBUM OF ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION!, May 12, 2000
Alice Cooper reminds me of David Bowie in some respects. Not the style or the look or anything, but, the willingness to go out on a limb and try something different. Not every Bowie fan likes every Bowie album and that could also be said about Alice Cooper. I think "Trash" is a move on Alice's part to try his hand at a more mainstream album than he had done in the past. I think he completely succeeded here. The songs are about sex, love, and relationships gone wrong. These subjects are all rock and roll staples. What makes this different from the way a band more traditionally known for it's melodic bend is Alice's presentation. He snarls through the song "Trash" in a VERY Alice Cooper way. "It's just the way you love me when you turn to t r a a a s h." He makes it sound so...wicked. "Poison" is one of my all time favorite songs. Hasn't everybody known somebody that just pushed all the right buttons but you KNOW better than to touch? "I wanna love you but I better not touch." For most of the other songs, you can get a clue as to what it's about by the song's title, except, perhaps, "Bed of Nails", which is a song about down and dirty sex. "Love hurts good...I'll drive you like a hammer on a bed of nails.". Just for balance, Alice added a ballad, "Only My Heart Talkin'". Overall, the album is more commercial than a lot of Alice's previous work. I expect some of the fans of his much older material may find it a little, hmm, commercial for their liking. As for the rest of us that love the melodic hard rock bands and the lighter side of Alice, this album is a must! If you are a fan of bands within the aforementioned group, such as, Aerosmith and Def Leppard, you may be in for a pleasant surprise. Many of the bands have 1999-2000 releases. After you pick up a copy of "Trash", you might want to go check out your favorites. Need a memory jog? Click on over to my home page on Amazon. I have most of the bands reviewed or at least mentioned. Are you ready to rock? :o)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Return to the limelight - 3.5 stars, March 16, 2007
Old skool heavy rock fans hate this album. They hate the whiff of sellout, the guest appearances like the co-writing with Desmond Child, Richie Sambora and Jon Bon Jovi. They hate the fact that people as varies as Stiv Bator, Steve Lukather and a whole heap of Aerosmith and girlie faves like Kane Roberts and Kip Winger were also features. Particularly in relation to the latter two mentioned, they take umbrage that such third tier types were in posession of bigger profiles than their teenage shock rock idol circa '89.
The simple fact is that this sort of collaboration is exactly what Alice needed to bring him up to date. To bring his legacy to a new generation and the plain truth is that since this album the Coop has never fallen off the radar as badly as he had with dross such as Special Forces and Da.
The worst things that could be said of this album are that it's a cop out with all the extra writers and that it's a shameless sellout. But even a sellout is better than what we'd put up with prior to this release.
But just cos I'm not someone who was 18 when Billion Dollar Babies came out and therefore feel obliged to hate everything that came after doesn't mean I find this album faultess. Far from it. So, IMHO;
- Poison is a great song and a great way to start an album. Other highlights would be Bed of Nails in a cheesy sort of way and Spark in the Dark and House of Fire scoot along quickly enough that you almost don't notice the shaky musical premises their built on. Nicely flowing chorus' on tunes such as This Maniacs in Love With You and the visceral vocal performance of Why Trust You (a little out of place on a disc so smoothly produced by Desmond Child) lift these tunes to at least bog standard level.
- However despite Alice trying to talk it up at the time, Only My Heart Talkin' was never gonna have much impact on the charts. And Hell is Living Without You is filler while I'm Your Gun - well they probably figured that if they tacked it onto the end of the album nobody would notice it. And given the calibre of the songwriters here it's pretty scary they couldn't come upwith at least ten decent tunes.
- Alice Cooper still has something about him on pretty much any release he touches. And his brand of shock rock that at times delved into art rock is here fairly streamlined into mainstream late 80's hard rock. The riffs are clean, the production nice and when it does work it works pretty darn well. For heavens sake even Barry Manilow loving housewives like my mother liked Poison the thing was so darn catchy!
This slice of corporate rock ain't the best Coop product by a fair margin. But it gave him back the commercial impetus to relaunch his career and he subsequently grabbed that chance with both hands so regardless of what the purists may think this is an important album in the mans cataluge, but not always for the music itself.
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album Trash 
