[Resurrected]

[uwe]

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"!).





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! )

- 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!  )

[ack1961]

Why couldn't he let this album fade out into a muddy memory?

Why does an album that is not that great to begin with need to be "resurrected"? 
- no matter how you slice Olive Loaf, it's still Olive Loaf.

[TBird1958]

Why couldn't he let this album fade out into a muddy memory?

Why does an album that is not that great to begin with need to be "resurrected"?  
- no matter how you slice Olive Loaf, it's still Olive Loaf.

3 words....... and Kiss' best song.


Detroit Rock City.



I recall Rolling Stone's review on it when new - Actually they complained that Bob Ezrin kept finding ways to get his children onto the albums he was producing -  FWIW I didn't find his work with Alice Cooper on "Welcome to my Nightmare" to anything to write home about. Honestly, "Billion Dollar Babies" was his high point..........shoulda tacked it up after that.

[uwe]

Ezrin is a producer in an old-fashioned, all encompassing sense, not just an engineer. His style of grand production might not be for everyone but being the guy who let the Alice Cooper Band leave their early garage sound behind, recording Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album (when neither the subject matter nor the music were very commercial), putting Peter Gabriel on the map with his debut and last but not least Destroyer speak for themselves.

He also has a knack for arranging things, School's Out, Another Brick in the Wall, Solsbury Hill and Detroit Rock City are all arrangement-wise creatures of his design. And I believe that the arrangement on all four was crucial to their success. I've heard Waters' original demos to ABITW, Ezrin's motownish/funkish arrangement made all the difference, the original sounds like a bluesrock jam in contrast. And what would DRC be if Ezrin had not insisted that Gene learns that - very unusual for a rock shuffle - Stax bass run? The twin guitar harmony part in the middle is also his idea. Solsbury Hill was just a jam, he insisted that it makes the album. And thanks to his production, School's Out (the single) cost more to make than entire Slade albums of the time.

In the sense of "grand production", he is my favorite producer. I'm itching to hear what he will do to Purple who always shunned producers (Derek Lawrence on their first three albums maybe excepted) and preferred the sound engineer type as producers (both Martin Birch and Roger Glover were just that, great sound engineers, yes, but not producers as Bob Ezrin is one).

I know that Ezrin's productions are often divisive - I remember Lee Aaron (anybody remember her as well?) in a blind fold test ranting about a Hanoi Rocks tune: "Is that a Bob Ezrin production? (And it was.) Sounds like it. Just so horrible! No one deserves to sound like that anymore today, guitars billowing everywhere ...", but I believe all of Ezrin's productions have aged better than Ms Aaron's turnout in the 80ies.

[4stringer77]

Hotter than hell was produced like crap but I like the tunes better. Btw Uwe, you may not come across too many latinos over there in Allemania but spic is a pretty derogatory term. I just hope nobody visiting or any members were offended.

[Hörnisse]

Growing up in Texas most of my life I've heard worse.  When I attended college in North Carolina back in the late 70's/early 80's they thought I was an "Injun". 

I was 14 when Destroyer came out.  I loved every track on that record.  I'll have to buy the new version then Uwe.

[ack1961]

Growing up in Texas most of my life I've heard worse.  When I attended college in North Carolina back in the late 70's/early 80's they thought I was an "Injun". 

I was 14 when Destroyer came out.  I loved every track on that record.  I'll have to buy the new version then Uwe.

c'mon...every track?!  Isn't "Beth" on that album?

[Hörnisse]

My favorite song on the LP is "Great Expetcations".  Detroit Rock City just flat out rocks.  Ezrin wanted Gene to play a riff similar to Curtis Mayfield's "Freddie's Dead" line.  I'm 51 now and still listen to the record.  Still have my original Blue label Casablanca version.

[Nocturnal]

I loved this album when it came out (I was 12 I think?) and still love it today (Beth...meh). I will have to pick this one up. I rarely listen to KISS anymore, but I'm interested in this.

[ack1961]

OK, what the hell - I'm paying to download the Resurrected album (my 1st Kiss album) right now - except for "Beth".  I will never pay for that POS although I find it comical that a guy dressed like a kitty cat sings it.

Do I send the bill to Germany if it still sucks?

[dadagoboi]

Growing up in Texas most of my life I've heard worse.  When I attended college in North Carolina back in the late 70's/early 80's they thought I was an "Injun". 

I was 14 when Destroyer came out.  I loved every track on that record.  I'll have to buy the new version then Uwe.

So we're using Texas and North Carolina as the norm of decent taste?  Might as well use Nazi Germany...and what exactly is worse than Spic? Nigger? Kike? Democrat? Kraut Asshole?

[ack1961]

So we're using Texas and North Carolina as the norm of decent taste?  Might as well use Nazi Germany...and what exactly is worse than Spic? Nigger? Kike? Democrat? Kraut Asshole?

So, you just made North Carolina & Texas equivalant to Nazi Germany...I've lived in both states and I'm not seeing the correlation.
BTW, you can't say "democrat" here - this is supposed to be a family friendly forum.

[jumbodbassman]

not gonna start buying their stuff now.,  never did anything for me.

[the mojo hobo]

+1

[Highlander]

Ahh '76 and I remember there first gigs here supporting that LP...