KISS - Kiss
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Rolling Stone Rating: 4
Good taste is murder to rock & roll. Just take a look around. Fact is, from Elvis to the Sex Pistols, the best rock & roll has always been strictly in bad taste. But time and again, rock & rollers refuse to remember this, and, as they get older and richer, sure enough, they start worrying about which fork is for the salad.Except for a brief and regretted lapse on the oily Destroyer, Kiss has stood for nothing if not bad taste. And it's the utter vulgarity of the blood spitting, the platform shoes, the makeup and the under produced songs about grimy sex and dumb partying that's made these guys one of the only genuine rock & roll bands in this benighted decade. But now, having constructed a most magnificently meretricious commercial empire from a consummate sense of grossness and stupidity, the members of Kiss have decided, so it seems, to remove the camouflage and reveal themselves on these solo albums for what they really are: four tuna with good taste. Alas, fellas, Kiss don't need tuna with good taste, Kiss needs tuna that taste good. Don't they ever learn?But wait. What's that word? What's that sound? Miracle of miracles, good taste behind Kiss' bad taste is even worse than what passed before! Whole new realms of revulsion from rock & roll's supreme Awful Majesties!That said, it'd be difficult and not a little unfair to single out any one of the four Kiss-ers for worst bad-taste honors. But when drummer Peter Criss, a guy who's made a million bucks wearing a silver button nose and kitty whiskers, tells me in his "Hooked on Rock 'n' Roll" that it's been a rough road to the top, I wince with him. I also hasten to add that the further soul posturing in "Tossin' and Turnin'" and Criss' kitsch classic, "That's the Kind of Sugar Papa Likes," isn't going to make the road back down any smoother. Of course, the name of the game is: get bad.In between the funk on Criss' record are several ballads, a form that almost everyone in the group apparently believes is the true hallmark of a rocker's good taste. The Catman (who wrote and sang the tear-jerker hit, "Beth," on Destroyer) is in his element here and almost scores again with the grandiose "I Can't Stop the Rain." Beyond that, my notes say: "Out-of-tune acoustic playing. One note is good." Which just about sums up this LP. Criss couldn't be worse.Then again, he could be Ace Frehley, who reveals in tunes such as "Snow Blind," "Ozone" and "Wiped-Out" that he's got booze and drugs on (in?) his mind much of the time. Musically, Frehley illustrates this fact with a lot of prewashed Jimi Hendrix-style guitar playing and some oddly appealing, Todd Rundgren-like teenage-spacester singing. In his particular bid for respectability, Kiss' lead guitarist eschews ballads, preferring instead to crank up long instrumentals like a veritable Sheepshead Bay Beethoven. One result, "Fractured Mirror," has a duh-hey simplicity that in other quarters might make it Enoesque. Only on "Rip It Out," a fast rocker with great nasty lyrics that urge the girl to actually rip her heart out, does Frehley get it all together. Whatever it is.True to his Kiss persona as the Lover (he wears red lipstick), rhythm guitarist/lead vocalist Paul Stanley concentrates on love songs. Presumably because he's one of the band's two chief song-writers and thus gets more practice at the craft, Stanley's no stranger to a nice melody, frequently sweetened by acoustic guitars and airy harmonies. (His "Ain't Quite Right" is nearly Brooklynese Crosby, Stills and Nash.) Fortunately, good taste falters when Stanley's singing ventures too close to the Art Garfunkel threshold of high-pitched sensitivity and is finally brought low by his lyrics, especially in the two bittersweet parenthetical meister works, "Hold Me, Touch Me (Think of Me When We're Apart)" and "Take Me Away (Together as One)." Bad. And wondrously so.Gene Simmons, singing bassist, Bat-Lizard and gross-out king of Kiss, is probably the brains behind the group. But his album begs the question: how much brains does it really take to be the brains behind Kiss? Less than Einstein, more than sweet potatoes would be my ballpark answer. While he definitely understands bad taste and its effective applications, Simmons here appears torn between the diligent grunge that's been his specialty and the True Self he no doubt displays privately to girl-friend Cher (who, incidentally, appears on "Living in Sin" as the telephone groupie, if my ears don't deceive me).Perhaps more than anything else, Simmons seeks respect for his notable wit. In his wittiest move, he's used two of the Beatlemania cast for backup vocals on a couple of Rubber Soul-type numbers. Gene Simmons also knocks off the best rock & roll song on any of these records with the extremely catchy "Radioactive." For the...
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