Paranormal

Editors’ Notes Pushing 70, Alice Cooper still knows how to have a good time. Produced by longtime collaborator Bob Ezrin, Paranormal recalls the golden age of albums like Billion Dollar Babies and Welcome to My Nightmare: campy, expertly calibrated hard rock, filled with sinister intimations and gleefully dumb jokes. Just listen to the roadhouse blues of “Fallen in Love” (featuring ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons), where Cooper bites off lines like “I’ve fallen in love and I can’t get up” without a flinch. Elsewhere, he riffs on societal degeneration (the soul-injected “Dead Flies”) and gender fluidity (“Genuine American Girl”), a subject on which the mascara-soaked Cooper was ahead of the curve by decades.