Tommy Snöberg Söderberg 
The Last Temptation was the album that unfortunately made me completely lose interest in Alice Cooper when it came out in 1994. I listened through it a few times, I suppose, but then it was simply left lying around and more or less forgotten. For the purpose of this review, however, I dug it out again to remind myself what it actually contains, and the result is mixed, to say the least.
The opening Sideshow almost sounds as if it could have been on one of the early albums, Love It to Death or Killer, albeit with a somewhat more modern sound. At any rate, it’s neither the kind of hard rock found on Constrictor and Raise Your Fist and Yell, nor the kind of well-produced radio rock that made up Trash. Of course it’s well produced, that’s not what I’m getting at, but it doesn’t feel quite as much like a crowd-pleaser as Trash. This is obviously a problem, while at the same time it’s rather nice to be spared the obvious attempts to create hits, and the result is that not very many of the songs really stick with you—at least not immediately. Basically, it’s the opening Sideshow and the singles Lost in America and It’s Me that are the immediate strengths.
Then again, it’s not as if the entire album follows the same pattern as the beginning. Not everything reminds me of Alice’s early ‘70s work, which I personally probably would have preferred, but there is quite a lot of newer sound here as well, and if Constrictor took Alice into the realm of hard rock, there are songs here that definitely take Alice a step further and closer to metal. I don’t think it suits Alice particularly well, but the arrangements are still fairly harmless compared with a lot of other things, so I can put up with it.
For the record, this is a concept album about a boy named—hold on to your hats now—Steven, and it originally came together with part one of a comic book trilogy. Now, I don’t know where I’ve put my comic, but as I remember it, it wasn’t something I particularly liked, and I also remember having a hell of a time trying to track down parts two and three of the comic because they were published in the US and I was in Sweden… Now, that doesn’t really have anything to do with the album itself, which so many years after its release is actually decent enough to listen to, even though it’s rather bland and doesn’t offer any real highlights (apart from Lost in America, which I really love).
One thing I have learned from getting reacquainted with it, though, is that I probably gave Muscle of Love too low a rating…
About the Author
