KISS: love them or hate them.

[AlAlvin]

OK, I just saw a Kiss cover band tonight. Kiss Army. They weren't too bad. They have the Gene Simmons seal of approval. Just wondering what others think on them. I saw them a few years ago on the first reunion tour and i luved them. Do you think its all stage show that made them what they are or did they write really great songs?

[Carl I.]

Raggz, care to answer? [img]biggrin.gif[/img]

Personally I could do without them. They always seemed like an imcomplete band that let the image make up for the lack of truely great song. Almost every song always seems one chord short of being "great", which makes them all that more disappointing. When I hear a KISS song, the riff starts, and I can picture where the riff should go to, but it never does, it always stops short. I've said that for a long time, that KISS is always just one chord short of being great.

[Marshy]

Kiss are a set of hedonistic wank, up there own arse, image first, money,money,money grabbing set of Dick wads who write the cheeziest songs on the planet ! .. saying this i think there Great ( Honest..) go to a gig and see a real blinder of a spectacle .. awesome !

"One chord short of being great eh Carl ?" Better than two chords short of being 'un-heard of' methinks.."

[Tim73]

Kiss were one of the 1st bands I ever got into but I do feel sometimes that it's "wrong" to like them. Still who cares, it's only music (& pinball machines!)

Not the sort of band I'd have blasting out the car - I still have memories of my Grandmother asking me if they are really singing what she thought she heard!

[SJ_Skyline]

It's funny how KISS polarise opinions, just like Marmite, people either love them or hate them.

Marylin Manson and Eminem also polarise well - the one thing all these people share in common is they are all extremely successful at making a shed-load of money.

Carl, I agree with you to an extent. Listening to Double Platinum the other day and it feels a little dated, the songs are not as fast as I remember them and the tracks sound a little fuzzy on the CD... Maybe I'm getting old [img]wink.gif[/img]

[Carl I.]

Originally posted by BIFFA BACON:

"One chord short of being great eh Carl ?" Better than two chords short of being 'un-heard of' methinks.."

<font size="4" face="Arial">From a financial standpoint I would agree. But for me it was always what hurt them to my ears. I would hear the song start, hear the chord progression, then during the riff it would fall apart and never be complete. It actually is what really turned me off on them.

My fave KISS album is easily The Elder. It's soooo impossibly bad that it's a wonder and a marvel that anybody would have ever thought to release it and is the ultimate sign of a band having too much power and success for their own good. So many people should have stepped in and said "this is terrible, you can't release it", but seeing as how it was KISS (though struggling a bit at the time), nobody has the balls to stop the travesty from being unleashed on the public. The only other time I had laughed so hard while listening to an album was the first time I heard Joe's Garage by Frank Zappa, but that one was supposed to make me laugh!

[chrisdamien]

I think Kiss had a lot of great songs in the early days. And after they put their make-up back on I got a new found respect for their 80's albums without the make-up too.

Some of those songs, especially from the first 3 records, couldn't have another chord in there in my oppinion. They are filled with different parts and intelligent arrangements. I mean, what is lacking in f.i. Black Diamond?

But since the first strike of success Kiss always seemed to be more about greed than music and as they've gotten older they, like everyone else, seems to get worse at hiding their real intentions .

I used to be a huge Kiss fan and still have a slim hope that the Paul Stanley solo record will be cool, if it is ever released, but as for Kiss I will never buy anything with a Kiss logo on ever again and definitly non of Gene Simmons' half-assed putting-new-vocals-on-other-peoples-demo-recordings shit.

I don't mind the clothing lines and all the merchandise and what have you..... Nikki Sixx among others had his own clothing line and there is nothing wrong with branching out as long as you still know that your main product is the music and if you don't put the effort there the empire will fall... Kiss are too greedy to care cause there are still a few people out there who might buy a new album anyway.

You get a pretty good view on how little effort they have put into their later records if you read Behind The Masks. Psycho Circus could have been a huge comeback for them, but instead of putting the effort in there and making a great album they released some shit they just cooked together in a hurry to get back on the road while Ace and Peter were still able to and while the fans were still excited about the reunion...... it's all there in the book with direct speech quotes from Paul and Gene among others

[Carl I.]

Not always "more chords" in the songs, but different ones. I don't know, it's just the way I always heard them. Album sales and influence obviously shows I'm in the minority.

[Sandy-Hazard]

When I first heard Kiss Alive I was in about Grade 5. Up until that point I had only been introduced to Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin and old 50's stuff. Then my brother had a party and people left a bunch of LP's. Nazareth Razamanaz (Brilliant album) Alice Coopers Welcome to my nightmare and Kiss Alive were amongst them. That was the day that my life and love of music changed.

IMO Kiss were a great live band. So we find out years later Alive and Alive II weren't really all live. Who cares, those are great albums and straight forward kick ass songs. Carl I am going to have to disagree with you about the songs. What could they possibly do to improve a song like Black Diamond as Chris said. Or C'mon and Love me, 100 thousand years. Those amongst others are good rock n' roll songs. Sure they are a joke now and all about the money. But for a brief time they were cool before they became all commercialized. Although Marcus may not agree with me...he-he....

[Hud McG]

Ya gotta love em'.
H