KISS - MONSTER
Universal

When I was eleven, Kiss was just about the greatest thing I’d ever come across. I spent a few obsessive years buying up albums, magazines, comics, books and posters, before the music that the band had introduced me to offered up better acts. I was into the more experimental nature of the stuff they were doing at the end of the 1970s – the pop metal albums, the disco experiments and the concept rock of The Elder. I was even willing to forgive them for panicking and lurching backwards into metal after that album bombed (because Creatures of the Night was a great metal album) and could even put up with their reluctance to ever admit to line-up changes. But a triple-whammy of the make-up coming off, the lacklustre Lick it Up and a genuinely nightmarish live show promoting that album was enough to ensure that I didn’t buy any more Kiss product after 1983. Still, you never forget that first love, and I kept up with what they were doing from a distance, even if I had no desire to actually buy any of it.

Perhaps I wasn’t alone in that attitude, because after their 1998 comeback, the band didn’t record another new album until 2009, preferring to milk the nostalgia circuit with increasingly extravagant additions to their ridiculously vast merchandise catalogue and to play lucrative but hardly credible events like The Kiss Kruise.

So another new album to follow Sonic Boom is quite a surprise, as is the fact that I find myself playing a new Kiss LP for the first time in almost three decades. That fact alone perhaps puts me at a disadvantage in comparing Monster with what has come before, because I don’t have those 1980s and 90s albums to look back on. Instead, I have to compare it to the classic Kiss era, and it’s always going to come up short. There’s nothing here that even comes close to the lascivious, sleazy, catchy grooves of Strutter, Love Gun, Detroit Rock City or even I Was Made for Lovin’ You.

There’s also nothing here that resembles anything else being done today. The 12 tracks here all feel like the sort of swaggering cock rock you’d expect to hear in the 1980s – but that’s probably not a bad thing. I doubt the Kiss army want to hear industrial, nu-metal, math rock or anything else like that. This album almost certainly delivers what both the band and the fans want to hear, I guess, and hell, it’s not as if Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley need the money. They can do what the hell they want I guess, and they clearly don’t feel in the mood for experimentation, right down to the sleeve that looks more like a Greatest Hits images than a new album (the promised artwork to rival Destroyer falling by the wayside it seems). The cover blurb boasts ‘no ballads, just full throttle rock ‘n’ roll'. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a ballad – Kiss were always best when stretching beyond their comfort zone, but here they are coasting.

Within that context, there’s some solid stuff here – you don’t have a career this long without learning how to do what you do pretty well. All for the Love of Rock ‘n’ Roll (and you don’t get a more Kiss song title than that) is an effortlessly commercial tune, with Eric Singer taking lead vocals (both Singer and his fellow hired hand / makeup interloper Tommy Thayer get leads on the album), and other tracks like Take Me Down Below, Back to the Stone Age, Long Way Down and Last Chance all offer catchy choruses and solid riffs. Whether any of these songs will stick in the mind after an initial listen is debatable, but long-term fans (and this is unlikely to recruit new Kiss Army members) should find this to be a solid facsimile of what they grew up with.

DAVID FLINT

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