Band:	Alice Cooper
Album:	DaDa
Style:	New Wave, Hard rock, Glam rock
Release date:	September 1982

01. DaDa
02. Enough's Enough
03. Former Lee Warmer
04. No Man's Land
05. Dyslexia
06. Scarlet And Sheba
07. I Love America
08. Fresh Blood
09. Pass The Gun Around

I can't remember ever feeling so misled by an opening track. The title track of DaDa is a dark and terrifying soundscape of clanking, pounding, machine noises and audio samples (including a doll's voice) with space-age synths leering overhead. "DaDa" is easily one of the most interesting and unorthodox pieces of music in Alice Cooper's discography, and by the first 30 seconds I was all geared up for a full album's worth of chilling ambient music. No matter how many times I listen to DaDa, I still get disappointed by the reality.

"DaDa" is the only song on the album that dares to be so different; though the rest of the material is dodgy and off-balance enough that it could hardly withstand a trial with a mainstream audience (and didn't), DaDa as a whole has recognizable precedents within Alice's prior new wave experiments. "Enough's Enough," which kicks in much too immediately after the demise of "DaDa," is jaunty and dancey like "Go To Hell," but is thin and spaced-out like something from Flush The Fashion. "No Man's Land" attempts a similarly carefree pop-rock groove, and "Former Lee Warmer" wraps itself in such warm orchestrations that it could almost be a descendant of Welcome To My Nightmare. This is the other most noteworthy song on the album: it's low-key and intentionally somber enough that Alice's performance plays pretty smartly into the atmosphere, and the song gels well with "DaDa."

Alice's new wave era has never been remembered with an overage of fondness, but in a lot of cases, the songwriting isn't too far off the mark; tracks like "Dyslexia" and "Pass The Gun Around," performed by a steady band, might be recalled much more warmly, and "Scarlet And Sheba" could have fit comfortably on Hey Stoopid or Trash if only given the chance. What really causes these albums to suffer is the performance. Alice was in a bad place during these years, and that shows in the almost complete lack of investment he has in these songs. His vocals are lifeless and the instrumentation is flaky, awkward, and charmless in his wake, hung out to dry by a similarly enervating production. It's possible, maybe even easy, to get a taste for this material - I, for one, will listen to anything that Alice has ever recorded - but nothing can make up for how dull and artificially sour this album sounds.

DaDa is a creepy album in the truest sense; some of this does stem from the unconventional twists and carnival-of-the-damned theatricality, but even when the nightcrawling terror of the opener vanishes, there is something indescribably off about this album. I am convinced that it follows from Alice's instability and addiction, because a sense of unnatural imbalance prevails and warps these off-kilter tracks even further.