#496 Kiss - Destroyer

Mike hates Kiss. So, expect his review to be laced with hate crimes and obscenities. In all honesty, I could care less about Kiss. I don’t love them, but I’ve never hated them. My only feelings toward the 70’s megastars is and always been simply this, “What was the big deal?” I can attribute part of that attitude toward my youth (born in 1983) and my removal from the culture of the Kiss era, but after listening to Destroyer a fair amount of times my feelings remain the same. “What was the big deal?”

Destroyer starts out with an attempt at creating a image of what the album has in store by giving us an inordinate amount of noise that is supposed to be engines revving leading us into “Detroit Rock City.” Each time this played, I skipped over it until I heard music playing. I found it extremely annoying and distracted and I’m usually all for experimentation and noise. We get it guys. Your song referencing Detroit and a vast amount of cars are made, or used to be made, there. I could deal without the drag strip racing noise fiasco.

Aside from that, I found this album to be mediocre. I can only explain its popularity by the fact that Kiss found an ingenious way to market themselves and their make-up. Look up any article you can find on Kiss and they all mention two things; Kiss were great at marketing their image and they had one hell of a stage show. Does this mean that Lady Gaga will eventually make her way onto a future “Greatest Albums of All Time” list? No disrespect to Gaga, I respect her for her theatricality and find her songs catchy as hell (no doubt Mike will have his own thoughts after reading that comment), but her inclusion on this type of list is hard to consider. I feel the same way about Kiss. Maybe their stage show was great. I could see myself in the 70’s driving around in a Dodge Dart belting some of these tunes out with my friends in the same fashion that we sometimes yelled out Bon Jovi songs. Not for our critical regard towards Bon Jovi, but instead the sing-a-long-ness they provide for a group of teens afflicted with undiagnosed ADHD. Hell, I might have even been down with the face painting factor, though this I highly doubt due to the fact that I could care less about Hollywood Undead (another face disguising band that Mike and I agree parents don’t understand therefore driving their rebellious teens to listen).

My main dilemma with this album is that I find all the songs between “Detroit Rock City” and “Shout It Our Loud” to be kitschy and lame. The main case for this claim is the hardly raunchy “Great Expectations” with its timeless (read that as sarcasm) lyric, “You watch me singing this song / You see what my mouth can do / And you wish you were the one I was doing it to.” I have no problem with the raunch-factor, but I feel other bands have done it much better. As I said before, most of the songs were a let-down until “Shout It Out Loud” and “Beth,” of which the latter is just a ballad that led the way for the Monster Ballad mania of the 1980’s. The album was listenable, but I feel that Kiss’ ability to put on one hell of a stage show has led them to be regarded as a great rock and roll band while, in my opinion, this is not the case. It has happened before and continues to happens in cases of bands far worse, but it never fails to cause irritation. Just an okay album, but not worthy of inclusion.

-d.

……Oh I’m sorry, Kiss. Did you start the song finally? I thought maybe those first few minutes of quiet engines were your idea of music. It sure tops some of what else is here. Now very quickly I do find a huge positive. Gene’s bass playing is actually very precise and clean, something a lot of 70’s bands really lacked. He’s no John Deacon or Chris Squire, but he plays some mildly prog-y licks on Detroit Rock city and really keeps the song moving. Which is very important, because the lyrics here dredge the depths of schlocky “I’m so tough” hair metal stereotypes.

King of the Nighttime World would have been huge if it had been recorded by Great White in ’88. But it wasn’t, and Great White sucked anyways. After three listening, I still haven’t actually caught a verse here because the chorus is stuck in my head. It’s not catchy. It’s just repeated (and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated) til you can no longer fathom that there was any other part to the song. Next up you have what I can only imagine was a huge influence on Spinal Tap, God of Thunder. Please, guys, I’m not sure what’s involved with ‘robbing me of my virgin soul’, but I think the first few tracks already accomplished the goal.

Oh but here comes Great Expectations! Who thought it was a good idea for Kiss to attempt to sound like David Bowie gone pop? The most vocally challenging song on the album and it’s handed to the worst singer in the band. Just hit skip. Flaming Youth. Yeah, just go ahead and hit skip again. Sweet Pain? I’ll take ‘potential titles for this review’, Alex.

Shout It Loud, isn’t half bad. By far my favorite song from Kiss. Sounding like a cross between Meatloaf and The Who (that sounds like an horrible idea in writing, but it works somehow), there’s a nice balance between aggression and melody. Actually a pretty fun foot stomper, so far 1 for 7. Then Beth happens. I keep going back and forth on this one. The orchestration is very nice, at times downright beautiful. But I can’t help thinking this should have been a Rod Stewart song. I effing hate Rod Stewart. While the lyrics lack any subtlety or depth, considering this is Kiss, it’s practically worthy of an Ivor Novello award (look it up, heathens).

Finally we come to Do You Love Me, a song so brash as to ask “do you love my seven inch…… leather heels”. Ew. And no. As a matter of fact let me answer the entire song with a very emphatic negative. I don’t expect every band to have the gentle touch and smooth way with words of say, early Queen, or later day Pink Floyd. But for Satan’s sake, Kiss, buy a thesaurus! It’s called innuendo, look it up. Billy Holliday asked for a hotdog for her bun, and I’m guessing she wasn’t hungry. So much is wrong here, so much is bad. Please let there be no more Kiss on this list……..

-the Fat Man