The Kiss Studio Albums

[captainkurtz]

Yeah...hot in the shade wasn't 'good at the time'...it felt like barrel scraping and the final act of a band long past their prime...which makes the follow up even more impressive...

[Slim]

Smashes, Thrashes & Hits: the new songs (December 1988)

Wasn't really aware of these; I think I'd heard the titles but hadn't given them another thought.

Let's Put The X In Sex - I get a strong Addicted to Love vibe from this one and the video reinforces that. It's not bad. Actually I quite like it.  It swings nicely, it's fun. The guitar riff reminds me of Michael Jackson's Black or White, although it does predate that tune by a couple of years.

There's a YouTube video of the band performing this with a girl who looks about 12 doing the lead vocal. Only Kiss, eh?

(You Make Me) Rock Hard - it's not awful but it's very unexceptional. Sounds like a Bon Jovi outtake. The shouty vocal is a bit irritating.

I listened to the Love Gun remix as well, don't know what they were thinking there. Maybe they wanted to get it to sound a bit more "produced" and sophisticated in line with their more recent material? If anything it just highlights how basic the production job was in the first place.

And I listened to the Eric Carr Beth vocal - it's OK, but seems very pointless to me. Actually I think a bit of autotune would have helped.

[Slim]

16: Revenge (May 1992)

Make no mistake, this is a killer album. If ever a band and a producer were made for each other, it's Kiss and Bob Ezrin. From the first moment that Gene's vocal kicks in on the first track, it's clear that this is a very different proposition indeed.

Yes it's lush, sophisticated and polished - you'd expect nothing else with Ezrin in charge. But it sounds HUGE. It has massive balls. It has a terrific, gutsy guitar sound with loads of deep, punchy bass and big drums. It has the old Kiss personality and character in spades. It has ENORMOUS presence. Sure, there's more than a touch of the hair metal sonic approach, there's a bit of the '80s metal sound as well - but there's a real rock and roll power and spirit in these tunes.

And a sense of fun.

Gene especially seems to have invested more effort and personality into this record than he did in the previous three combined. His voice gets a lot of prominence in the mix on all of his tunes, Unholy especially and he delivers a massively spirited, larger-than-life-sized-man performance in all of them. I don't know what Ezrin did to his voice on Unholy but it sounds fantastic - he does a sort of phlegmy, throaty macho caricature growl through the whole thing, I think it's double-tracked. There's a bucketload of reverb on it. It sounds amazing and the sheer power and swagger of the band behind it does it full justice. This is nothing short of BRILLIANT. Similar thing on Thou Shalt Not.

Domino is belting as well and uses that same gruff throaty growl to superb effect. It also has a touch of the old Simmons instinct for poetry:

Got a reputation
Haven't got a hope
It's a sticky situation
If she ain't old enough to vote

Ah yes, then of course there's Every Time I Look At You, and it's the sort of faintly country-ish acoustic-morphing-into-electric power ballad nonsense that I can't abide. But the rest of this album is just so relentlessly balls-to-the-wall* that it comes as a sort of welcome contemplative interlude. A breather. I have to give it a pass. Actually I think Paul was trying to recycle REO Speedwagon's Can't Fight This Feeling, and he got pretty close.

I laughed when I noticed that Gene had stolen a line from Spinal Tap's Big Bottom for Spit, but then again, Big Bottom refers to a "love gun", so - what goes around comes around.

This time I think the Gene songs stand out more than the Paul songs. In fact they definitely do. But they're all good. I Just Wanna is a sort of homage to Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues. It has a nice choral moment about half-way through.

As for the cover of God Gave Rock'n'Roll To You - that was a minor hit for Argent in the '70s and it used to get the occasional play on rock radio shows so I've known it since I was a teenager. The first time I heard this Kiss version, in a car radio in 1993, I remember thinking that they must have run out of ideas. But honestly I think they bring something new to it. It suits them. And it fits into the flow of the album quite nicely.

I was surprised to hear the BBC get a mention on Heart of Chrome.

It'll take a few more spins for this glorious record to bed in and it'll get a lot more than a few - but I'm confident that this meisterwerk is among the mightiest of all Kiss albums. I have deprived myself of this album for the last thirty years of my life, and I'll never get them back.


^{* I've never been 100% sure what this means, I stole it from Geoff Barton.}

[Thenop]

Kiss were on a mission this time and they meant it. Ezrin was brought into the fold, Eric Singer was recruited as the new drummer after Carr's unfortunate demise due to a rare cancer of the heart. He died the same day Freddie Mercury did, something largely overlooked by the media which prompted Stanley to write a heartfelt letter to Rolling Stone magazine:



Why is this album so different, and so much better than previous ones? Ezrin? yes, partly but look at the song writing credits. Notice anything? Vincent Cusano aka Vinnie Vincent. That is correct the very same Vincent that was kicked out 10 years prior. That is how much the band wanted to prove themselves that tehy even sort of humbled themselves by bringing him back into the fold. Unholy, Heart of Chrome and I Just Wanna were penned at least partially by him. All 3 are killer tracks.

God Gave Rock'n'Roll To You II was done with Eric Singer on drums as the first song and Ezrin producing as a try out, to see if it would work. They recorded it for the Bill & Ted movie and it turned out so weel they decided to put it on the album. Carr was heartbroken, still alive at the time he got to hear another drummer playing drums on what was his band. He was in the video, really sick at the time. He would pass away soon after.

I agree the ballad is not my thing at all, but this one sounds a lot better than the previous ones, I'll give them that. Having said that it is (together with GGRNRTY) minor detractions on an otherwise fantastic album.

Ezrin pushed all of them , but mainly Kulick to the brink simply saying 'not good enough' if he came in with any solo. Just to push him that much more.

Gene's Unholy fit his persona so well that they made it the album opener, a very strong track.

Lyrically the album is very Kiss, although in the fourties now..

The band themselves really rate this album as well, all 4 recording members that is. This is what Stanley and Simmons had in mind when it came to recording an album all these years. Focused, well produced and extremely well played. All the Zeppelin hints, the national anthem playtime (Spit) and similar intros (Heart of Chrome / Tough Love) or even the most kickass intro they ever did: Paralyzed. Fantastic. 

Some of these tracks made it onto the setlist for the coming tour, even playing some of these on the convention (acoustic) tour.

Closing off with a nice hommage to Carr with a 1981 recorded drum solo is a very nice touch, oddly enough recorded by Ezrin as well.

[David L]

Think I"ll have a listen to Revenge from Qobuz

[The Picnic Wasp]

I always associated balls-to-the-wall with Paul Stanley using it in a TV interview, I think on the Kiss Symphony DVD. I didn't realise that Geoff Barton had coined it. I never quite got the metaphor but I've just looked it up and it comes from the world of aviation. A pilot would push the plane throttles forward using the ball handles on the top, toward the firewall to gain the maximum thrust (which is a good Kiss word).

[David L]

I always associate the phrase with German metallers Accept

[Slim]

I always associated balls-to-the-wall with Paul Stanley using it in a TV interview, I think on the Kiss Symphony DVD. I didn't realise that Geoff Barton had coined it. I never quite got the metaphor but I've just looked it up and it comes from the world of aviation. A pilot would push the plane throttles forward using the ball handles on the top, toward the firewall to gain the maximum thrust (which is a good Kiss word).

I doubt Geoff coined it - but he did use it more than once.

[captainkurtz]

Complete agreement there - Revenge is an astonishing accomplishment given almost a decade of poor records.  Still sounds contemporary now.  Wish I'd seen them when they played in Whitley Bay in 1993..

[Slim]

17: Carnival of Souls: The Final Sessions (October 1997)

Released nearly two years after it was completed due to the reunion tour, and that "The Final Sessions" suffix is perhaps a hint that the band don't want you to think of this as a bona-fide instalment in their canon, more a document of what they were doing at the time. So - I have to qualify my comments here somewhat. It wasn't, as far as I can tell, really released as a new Kiss album proper, and perhaps it's unfair to judge it in that light.

Then again there must have been an intention to do that when it was recorded.

Very odd one, this. It's as if the band had made an hour long appearance on Stars In Their Eyes to impersonate Alice in Chains, and there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement of this on Rain. "I think it's going to rain", Paul sings. When I die?

Bruce's guitar style really suits this approach. So does Gene's vocal style. Paul's - not at all.

Honestly, for what it is, it's not all bad. There are some decent tunes. I liked Hate, I liked Jungle. I liked Seduction of the Innocent, which although still a dirge at least has a bit of subtlety. I liked I Walk Alone, sung by Kulick. Decent singer.

I didn't like I Will Be There which is an acoustic tune with strings, although it still has a grungy stripped-down ethos somehow.

But mostly it's pretty lacklustre. It's wilfully joyless. Utterly so if you compare it to the rest of the Kiss canon. It's certainly dismal if you compare it to Dirt or Facelift, and that's a comparison you can't avoid. And even the songs I liked aren't great.

But more importantly - how could anyone, even the most diehard Kiss fan, take this pretence seriously? This was an established band with a long and partly distinguished history composed of middle-aged men, not a group of young men from the suburbs of Seattle. It must have been very obvious by now that Gene and Paul would jump on any bandwagon to try to stay current and relevant. It really feels powerfully inauthentic.

[dom]

I've had a little delve in here and there.

I think this thread (enjoying it as I am though) could have been a whole lot shorter

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid

They are essentially the American version of Status Quo

[Slim]

I used to think Foghat were the American Status Quo, until I found out they were English.

[dom]

Know nothing of Foghat but I see KISS as the Las Vegas version of Quo to be more precise.

A lot brasher, and with a much bigger stage, costume, pyrotechnic and make up budget.

Much, much bigger egos but similar amount of talent!

[Thenop]

Carnival of Souls is an interesting one. Like the Elder, it exists outside of the normal Kiss realm. It was not toured, and only released because it was bootlegged and they figured just put it out there.

I agree Simmons is much more suited for this than Stanley who seems to chameleonize to the style whereas Simmons just does what he does.
Production is of it's time, very dry and direct.

I enjoyed it at the time and at it every now and then but never get to the end.
I do enjoy quite some tracks, Childhoods End I have the inexplicable fondness for. The nod to God of Thunder is fun.

Stanley wrote a bunch of samey sounding tracks and his singing sounds he doesn't believe what he is doing. Neither do I, although I like Jungle probably more than I should. It Never Goes Away has horrid lyrics..
Bruce's vocal debut is great but they stuck it all the way at the back of the album, missed opportunity in my eyes.

The band never cared for this one, cover 'art' is non exist ant, just a random band shot.

It wasn't a good sound for the band and they knew it. Their minds were elsewhere at the time, when this was released the Reunion tour was already in full swing.

One thing, although this is a studio album thread, the unplugged album should not go unnoticed. I really enjoy that one still. It has a bit of everything: obscure tracks, hits and of course the inevitable reunion with Frehley and Criss. I remember I was away for the weekend and sat anxiously waiting for the TV in a holiday let for MTV to air this. Man it was exciting then. The entire acoustic convention tour had them dive into their past quite a bit taking requests from the audience. I heard quite some recordings from those shows and they were fun.
As oppose to the reunion which was vintage for sure: great to watch, and apparent hell for the band members to live through.

[David L]

I used to think Foghat were the American Status Quo, until I found out they were English.

"Slow ride, take it easaaay"
Classic Fog