Alice Cooper has always been one to go with the flow. Although his theatrical style and dark subject matter have influenced acts from Marilyn Manson to Slipknot, the heavy metal pioneer himself hasn’t been a hitmaker in decades. He dabbled in hair metal in the ’80s and industrial in the ’90s, to relative audience indifference. Nearly 40 years into his career, he’s still churning out albums and fighting that indifference; the latest attention-getting tactic is a concept album called Along Came a Spider, on which Cooper takes on the persona of a serial killer known as Spider.

Despite the theoretically expansive framework, Spider is a simple, stripped-down affair, with rudimentary hard-rock riffs supporting Cooper’s clumsy, on-the-nose lyrics. It lacks the grandeur or ambition of Nostradamus, the recent concept album from Cooper contemporaries Judas Priest. Instead Spider plods along with no sense of fun or excitement, recycling every serial-killer cliché you can think of, and relying on hokey voiceover interludes to explain the simple plot.

Cooper’s never been a great singer or lyricist, and he can’t get by on attitude alone here. His band plays with a sort of perfunctory competence, but the songs are as forgettable as the story. Even the Slash cameo on “Vengeance Is Mine” sounds as though a tape of the guitarist fooling around at a soundcheck was just grafted onto the song. Spider has nothing to indicate that continued indifference isn’t the best reaction to Cooper’s career.

The bottom line: **