This thread is not about the Obama administration and how the battle of the Alamo was all in vain now that a bunch of Spics determines your President (and doesn't vote for the other one whose ancestors fled the USA for Mexico for, errrm, marital reasons, life is all about irony sometimes!). I have long learned that this forum of apparently well-behaved and considerate mostly middle-aged white men turns into ragingly mad throngs of partisan zombies when we leave the issue of, say, string gauges for the irrelevance of a US Election. Sigh.
This thread is about the new Kiss remix release of their Destroyer (now called Destroyer [Resurrected]) album (often described by me as "one of the finest Bob Ezrin solo albums with all four members of Kiss guesting"!).
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If that kid who loved Destroyer initially when it came out is still somewhere in you (a friend from Sweden sent me a tape of it, he didn't like it and I wasn't expecting much from Dressed to Kill and the Alive album, Kiss seemed a heavy-handed affair to me, but when I heard that larger than life arrangement of Detroit Rick City I was in Alice Cooperish bliss, that is where I knew Ezrin's production handwriting from at the time),
GO ORDER/BUY THAT RELEASE NOW. You will be in for a treat.
Ezrin has remixed and remastered it himself and the result is sonically stellar. I find Destroyer to be head and shoulders over any other Kiss album in rank, but even in the remaster version a decade ago it still sounded a bit indirect (Ezrin's Spector influence) and weakish. That is all gone now:
- Criss' bass drum (yes, he played one) pummels and thuds through the album, his drums are louder and "nearer" (bye bye Phil Spector influence).
- Simmons' bass has been brought out to a degree that you can actually hear his pick sometimes and one some tracks even has mudbuckerish oomph. God of Thunder (the track) is now dominated by a threatening bass lava sound and the whole album is a pleasure for spotting nuances in Simmons' bass playing. (That must be a real first-timer: "Simmons" and "nuance" in one sentence and not juxtaposed either!
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- Yes, there is an acoustic guitar on Beth and now you can actually hear it (plus the bow attack of the orchestra's stringed instruments). Would you believe that Beth can sound powerful with all its orchestral might?
- The amount of new detail (sound effects, harmony guitars, acoustic guitars and harmony vocals, little bass runs, in places also some shaky timing!) is amazing.
Classic Rock (the Brit mag) opined that the sound of the new remix is "squeaky-clean", baloney, I have no idea what they were listening to or whether they are deaf, this now sounds like Kiss playing a faithful Destroyer version in your living room, it's that vibrant. Likewise, they have complained that the remaster painfully shows Simmons' limitations as a singer. Crap, Simmons' limitations as a singer are blatantly obvious any which way you produce the guy but I still prefer his voice to Paul's all too often histrionic approach.
Buy the CD. Now. I know Gene Simmons doesn't need the money. Or that he announced to vote for Mitt this time when he allegedly voted for Obama last time thus distorting the overall Jewish vote. This is Destroyer like it should have sounded all along. A (hard) rock classic to this day. 100% Blackmore-free too. (Though there is a slight connection with Ezrin producing the new DP album due for early next year!
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