Day 406: Kiss – Dressed to Kill
I am not feeling very up for it today, I ate so much sushi that I briefly thought I’d been poisoned. I need essentially the opposite of an artsy, cerebral album, I need the most mindless drivel I can think of. I figured I should go for something within the category of men with big hair screaming about the joys of making love to a woman, that’s the most thought-free music I can imagine, so today I thought it would be a good time to cover Kiss.
Album cover courtesy of Casablanca Records
Kiss was formed in 1973 by Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. Simmons and Stanley had been in a band called Wicked Lester, but when they broke up, the pair decided they needed a new group. They recruited Peter Criss from a classified ad in Rolling Stone and found Ace Frehley through an audition, and once the new line-up was complete, they set out to play harder music than they’d done with their previous folk rock group. Each of the members got kitted out with their iconic black and white face paint and adopted a new comic book-inspired persona: Paul Stanley became Starchild, Gene Simmons was Demon, Ace Frehley was Spaceman, and Peter Criss became Catman.
Dressed to Kill was released in 1975 as the group’s third studio album. It was produced by the band together with the head of their label, as the label was in such dire straits financially that they couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do it, and the future of the label honged on them getting a hit. Apparently the original vinyl recording also featured long pauses between songs to try to drag out the short runtime, as it’s only 30 minutes long.
Say what you want about Kiss, but they’ve got their branding down pat, they could probably be called the most recognisable rock band of all time. And they’ve definitely taken that to the bank, as they famously have merch spanning more than 3,000 categories, ranging from Kiss Kondoms to a Kiss Kasket, and they even sold comic books where the red ink was mixed with the blood of the members of the band – there’s no mentally healthy reason for any person to want that.
I’d argue that if your band is actually musically excellent, you just don’t have to flog 400 different types of mugs to keep the operation running. But I also just don’t think anyone puts on a Kiss album expecting musical excellence, they’re more of a novelty act with alright songs, and that’s what I got from Dressed to Kill. There wasn’t one second where I was particularly impressed by what they were selling on the musical front. And yet I think I could have a whole lot of fun if I went to see them, watching the pyrotechnics and marvelling at the walking venereal disease that is Gene Simmons, who claims to have bagged 5,000 groupies. Good for him, I guess? I don’t know.
Once you’ve heard one Kiss song, you’ve heard them all, but they’ve got their own thing going and god bless them for that. Dressed to Kill is a 5/10.