1979 was a strange year for KISS. After unsurmountable tensions led to a split-up for the making of solo albums, the utter box-office failure of said solo albums dictated a hasty return – after all, the money-making machine couldn’t stop, and when four individual albums sell substantially less than your last group effort, the only thing to do is to swallow your pride and get the hell back together. However, things got a little more complicated after drummer Peter Criss got in a car accident, leading to his replacement by long-time studio associate Anton Fig. Making matters worse was a motion picture reviled by the very bandmembers themselves, as well as Gene Simmons’ renewed interest in disco music…
The result of this conjunction of factors is well audible on Dynasty, an album which suffers from a severe lack of direction, inspiration and all-around spark. The irony was that, for the tour, a new, more ambitious concept was debuted: “Super KISS”, inspired by comic-book super-heroes and by Gene Simmons’ monstrous ego. Pyrotechnics went away up, lightning bolts and fiery guitars became even more commonplace, an itinerant theme park was built and taken on tour…and in the midst of it all, the substantial decrease in musical quality was successfully masked.
However, listening to Dynasty without all the contextual brouhaha, one can see how this record clearly marks the beginning of KISS’s downfall. Half of the time, the musicians’ heart seem to be someplace else, and the vast majority of the compositions is either half-baked or just plain awful. Take I Was Made For Lovin’ You, for example: as well-known and liked as this song is, “execrable” is about the most flattering adjective I can use with relation to it. Disco influences on this track are blatant and unabashed, especially in what concerns the drum line, and the chorus is just ridiculous.
Things get a lot better with the second track. 2000 Man is, unsurprisingly, a cover by a much better band than KISS, in this case the Rolling Stones. With its hard-rocking riffs and beats, it quickly asserts itself as the best moment on the album, which is somewhat worrisome: it says something about the overall quality of an album when its best song is a cover…
