On 1975's Welcome to My Nightmare, Alice Cooper largely traded in high school parking-lot hard rock for fright-show theater; it had bruising moments, but also self-parodying schmaltz. Welcome 2 My Nightmare is its sequel, so we get recurring bad-dream rockers, plus an "Underture" that melds Cooper's melodies into a symphonic montage.  The fun comes when he abandons the sequel concept in favor of a New Wave duet with Ke$ha and a decades- tardy anti-disco tune ("Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever") in which Alice tries to rap.  Slapstick was always his strong suit.

Listen to "Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever":

Related:
• Photos: 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
• Video: Jeff Beck Alice Cooper Interview

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”