I have to admit that I often find pure heavy metal albums a bit tiring to listen to, that endless assault begins to tire my brain towards the end, and always has done. It’s not that I dislike the genre, more that a little goes a long way.
And that said, the opening and closing tracks on this album are solid rock bangers, the kind that make you feel like you’re about to do something exciting and dramatic in the film that is your life. Probably involving a fast car, sunglasses, and high explosives. However that’s perhaps a poor comparison for the first track, Detroit Rock City, which was inspired by the death of a fan in a car accident. The Leader Of The Pack style car-crash noises at the end are in dubious taste in those circumstances, but nobody seems to have complained. Perhaps if you’re a Kiss fan, it’s considered an honour for your untimely death to be immortalised in song.
The rest of the album is some solid glam metal – you can hear the Alice Cooper inspirations throughout. For me, Cooper has the edge through more variety, although Kiss do throw in a couple of the required slower ballad numbers, Beth and Sweet Pain. As mentioned before, the album closer Do You Love Me is a bit of a solid rocker.
Where Kiss stand out, I think, is in the iconography. They’ve copyrighted their face paint designs (arguably Gene Simmons has the best one, The Demon), and were one of the first groups really to go full-on with (in the voice of Yoghurt from Spaceballs), moichandising. Kiss are as much a brand as they are a musical group, a very canny move on their behalf.
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