Now playing: Sonic Boom
I can’t believe I’m posting about this album. I really can’t. I didn’t expect to hear it at all, much less be writing about it. I was planning to post about either the new Michael McDermott album from this past summer, or the newest from David Crowder Band. But instead, I felt compelled to write about Sonic Boom, the new album from KISS.
Some background: I was a rabid KISS fan when I was in fourth grade. Back in 1976, KISS was in their prime, and I loved them. I used to listen to my older brother’s 8-tracks of Alive! and Destroyer. That year at Christmas I received my first KISS 8-track of my own, Dressed To Kill, while my brother got their newest, Rock And Roll Over. The following year, I got my second – the new release Love Gun.
For me, I suppose, it was all about the gimmick. Really, that’s what KISS has always been about anyway, hasn’t it? From the beginning until today, they’ve been average musicians and average singers. Sure, they’ve written some catchy songs over the years, particularly in the seventies, but were it not for the makeup and stage show, would they have ever become “the hottest band in the land”? It seems unlikely. It’s doubtful they would have lasted into the eighties, much less still be around thirty years later as they approach retirement age.
But in the seventies, as a nine-year-old, they were happening, baby. The makeup and costumes and fire-breathing and blood-spitting – how cool was that? They even had their own army. During my fourth grade year, myself and three friends performed as KISS during indoor recess at school (sans makeup and costumes, and definitely no fire or blood.) We played KISS albums and air-guitared our way through make-believe concerts as our classmates watched. (I was Paul Stanley, by the way, and the “tour” came to an abrupt end when Paul broke a chair.)
Unfortunately, my love affair with KISS would be short-lived. Within a year after my purchase of Love Gun, a man from our church had been traveling up north, and returned home with some tragic news. Someone at a church he’d attended had tipped him off that KISS was actually an acronym for “Knights In Satan’s Service.” This, of course, was untrue, though nobody knew it at the time. He proceeded to spread this breaking news to the parents at our small church and shortly thereafter, word came down from my parents: the KISS music had to go. I was crestfallen.
I would not hear another KISS album until I was in high school, when Lick It Up was released. I’ve heard many of their albums since the dawn of the eighties, and nothing has really compared to anything from those early days. They’ve released a long list of average (at best) albums, and so many times I’ve thought that they just needed to go away.
That brings us to 2009 and Sonic Boom. As I said, I had no intention of hearing this album, but since so many albums are uploaded to YouTube these days, I took a look and yes, all of the tracks were there. So I checked it out.
I’ve listened to it a number of times now, and it sounds like it could have (and perhaps should have) been the follow-up to Love Gun. It’s probably the best album they’ve done since 1978, although I’m sure that’s debatable among the true KISS faithful. The absence of Ace and Peter is unfortunate, but still, it has a very seventies-KISS feel to it, and most of the songs sound as though they would be right at home on any KISS album from their glory days. I like it. There, I said it. It’s not great, but I like it.
Granted, it’s still average music by average musicians, and the subject matter is the same it always is (because they only write songs about a single subject.) But it is for me a nostalgic album of sorts. Though they would be very far down the list today, KISS was my first “favorite band”, and listening to this album takes me back to the mid-seventies, to my elementary school years, and the genesis of my love of rock and roll. Thirty plus years later, I still love rock and roll, and apparently, I still like a good seventies KISS album.
Here is a live version of “Modern Day Delilah” (avert your eyes from the 60-year-old man repeatedly sticking out his tongue), and “Yes I Know (Nobody’s Perfect)”:
