KISS — Music From The Elder (review)

Album · 1981 · Hard Rock

3.5/5 · 2011-11-15
Warthur

After Unmasked flopped, Kiss needed to pull out something special. Initially planning to create a heavy rock album harking back to their glory days, the group soon hit upon a more ambitious idea: a prog rock concept album - no, make that a TRILOGY of prog rock concept albums, if Bob Ezrin's recollections are correct - associated with an epic fantasy movie based on their narrative.

Of course, the movie never manifested and nor did the two sequel albums. Gene Simmons has described the resulting album as a bad Kiss album, but would give it two stars as a "bad Genesis record". The description is rather apt; the album sounds absolutely nothing like Kiss, and it doesn't really sound much like prog rock or art rock either. It seems that whilst the band liked the idea of producing an arty concept album, they didn't really have much idea of what such a thing might sound like and didn't feel particularly inclined to do much research; the album sounds like someone's attempt to recreate a classic concept album by the likes of Genesis, Gentle Giant or Pink Floyd based on a fuzzy and not particularly detailed written summary of what the music sort-of kind-of sounds like, rather than actually listening to any of those acts and paying attention to how they do it.

So, what you have is the odd medieval flourish, some slower-tempo songs than Kiss usually make, a ballad or two... and one really confusing concept. The story is about some kid who is recruited by a secret society to do... something. We don't know what the purpose of this secret society is, or the role the villainous Mr Blackwell plays in anything, or what the hell Escape from the Island is about (said song being an instrumental, and said island and the escape attempt from it not being mentioned in any of the other songs), and we have no idea where the story was going to go because, of course, the album only represents the first act of a three-act story. Boiled down to its essentials, the story goes like this: Morpheus, the Order of the Rose's recruiter, asks the hero if he wants to join up. The boy says "yes." The Order leaders ask him to swear an oath. He does so. Everyone is glad he is a member of the club. The end.

Following the plot is even harder on some editions because in some releases the running order was meddled with; you can tell if you have one of these editions because The Oath, the lead single from the album, is at the start rather than its proper place in the running order. Actually, the best song on here is A World Without Heroes, which approaches interesting; the band dispense with pretensions towards art rock and provide a melancholy, low-key number about how miserable the world would get if nobody stepped up to the plate and did some heroing. But to clutch to it as an example of a really great song of the album is to clutch at straws; the fact is, this album consists of Kiss trying their hardest not to be Kiss, at a point in time when they were neither particularly good at being Kiss nor good at whatever the hell it was they were trying to be.

Bizarrely, this gives it a certain so-good-it's-bad charm, and I'm inclined to say that Gene Simmons is approximately right. As a Kiss album, this is a stinker, delivering nothing you look for from Kiss; as a "bad Genesis album", it's a poor imitation of prog rock hampered by a near-total disconnect from anything anyone in that scene was doing; as a bizarre so-bad-it's-good B-movie for the ears, it's weirdly amusing. My star rating is based on the latter, but let's go with Gene and say it's two stars if you want actual prog, or half a star if you were actually hoping to rock and roll all night to this.