Hollywood Vampires may be a supergroup, but their self-titled 2015 debut album was essentially a souped-up showcase for frontman Alice Cooper. Aerosmiths Joe Perry, Johnny Depp, and the band provided a hard-rocking foundation for Cooper to pay tribute to what he called his dead, drunk friends with covers of the Who, John Lennon, and Jimi Hendrix, among others all with his typically vaudevillian panache. They recorded a couple of originals for the record but more or less stuck to crowd pleasers like Whole Lotta Love and left space for famous friends like Paul McCartney and AC/DCs Brian Johnson to chip in.
For their second LP, Rise, they inverted the paradigm and recorded mostly originals with only a few covers, and its only now that it sounds like a band finding its footing. The bands MVP is still Cooper, who yuks it up about wanting a diamond selfie stick on the hard-rocking, seven-minute opener I Want My Now and remains the only vocalist alive who can sing a line like Darkness, for me, is all I know convincingly on a track called Mr. Spider. He flexes his sense of dark humor on the rockabilly boogie-woogie number Welcome to Bushwackers, which features John Waters and Jeff Beck, as he brags, Girls used to jump on me when I was 23, still do/Thats right, I repeat, they still do. Hes hilarious and confident even when some of his bandmates are experiencing growing pains.
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Oddly, some of the weaker moments here are the covers. Depps turn at the mic, for a rendition of David Bowies Heroes, is understated (though, truth be told, no one can do Bowies performance on that song justice) and Perrys vocal for a rendition of Johnny Thunders You Cant Put Your Arms Around a Memory is anemic. Neither would be as glaring if they werent next to performances by Cooper, who, at 71, sounds as though hes sipping blood from the fountain of youth. (The exception here is Depps punky take on the Jim Carroll Bands People Who Died, which captures the spirit of the first Vampires LP).
Despite the rocky vocal performances, Depp and Perry make up for their shortcomings on the guitar. The Boogieman Surprise has a woozy, sea-sickening riffs that give way to a big Cooper chorus, and New Threat is all blues-rock swagger with the sort of solo that harks back to Aerosmiths Seventies peak. The mix of songs is a little uneven (closing track Congratulations is a bizarre slam poem recited by Cooper, Depp, and Perry) but Rise shows where the bands three stars personalities unite in a Venn diagram and work together well. Its just that these Vampires sound best when theyre sharing the same blood source.