I appreciate Ace for what he is - I wouldn't have bought tickets for his club show here if that wasn't the case - but I find it amusing that he can't get a Les Paul to sing to save his life, hasn't progressed as a guitarist and is now blessed with a successor having to emulate his limitations though he could do better. Kiss were never a grooving (like Aerosmith) or smooth-sounding (like early Ted Nugent Stranglehold era) hard rock band (except when Ezrin's tough studio regime forced them to - and part of that is Simmons' heavy-handed, stomping bass playing and Stanley's rigid rhythm guitar, but it is also Frehley's stumbling timing and studdering, even notes-tripping-over-another, lead salvos. The only guy with a groove in the original band was Criss, but he was outnumbered 3:1.
The new album. It has cowbell. Those Kiss-typical slightly awkward changes from verse to chorus that are forever unable to really wed a hard verse and a poppy chorus elegantly together like, say, their role models Slade effortlessly could. The first half of the album is consciously made to sound like Rock'n'Roll Over (never my fave, I prefer Destroyer and Dynasty), the second half sees more eighties influences, chanty chorusses and all. Simmons' bass playing is loose and has room to breathe, lots of slides and burps (and it does sound like a passive Ripper rather than an EMG equipped Punisher could have done it), they thankfully shunned away from making the album compete with Metallica heaviness. Kiss are an old-fashioned (even in the seventies they sounded a little dated), even quaintly old-fashioned rock'n'roll band, not a heavy metal one.
As always, I find myself preferring the songs grunted by Simmons. Is it just me or are there really fewer songs sung by Stanley on this album than on "normal" Kiss ones? Eric and Tommy acquit themselves well as singers and Stanley wisely sings a little deeper, not in his sometimes painful screech that marred a lot of eighties and nineties albums.
Do I think it's better than Psycho Circus? I haven't heard a song on it that draws me in like some of the ones on Psycho Circus did (including that one's magnificent title track), but I think your average Kiss Army grunt who prefers Rock'n'Roll Over to Destroyer will be pleased. Also by the bonus disc rehashing the old hits which independent of the year they once surfaced all now sound like Rock'n'Roll Over outtakes except that today's Kiss is tighter than they used to be.
Lyrics are once again touchingly inane:
"If it's too hot
You're too cold
If it's too loud
You're too old"
Sheer bloody (or unbloody = kosher) poetry. A-students in Talmud class no doubt. People of the book.
But I still like'm!
