Post by Kapitan on Oct 27, 2019 15:02:18 GMT
KISS Animalize (1984)
Creatures of the Night and Lick It Up showed KISS finding their footing for a new decade and even beginning to regain some degree of commercial success after the rough patch bridging the ‘70s to the ‘80s.
Those years were also tumultuous. First came turnover on the drums with Peter Criss giving way to Anton Fig for two uncredited albums before being replaced by Eric Carr. Then guitarist Ace Frehley faded as uncredited session players took turns on a few several albums before Vinnie Vincent became the band’s second official guitarist.
Vincent proved unable to work with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons: a great guitarist, he seemed unwilling to play anything but a leading role. In this band, that was not going to happen. He was unceremoniously replaced by a brilliant but troubled talent, the virtually unknown Mark St. John.
St. John had been a guitar teacher in California before joining the band, and delivered a then-current style blending the speed of Vincent with some of the Van Halen-inspired tapping and whammy bar techniques that were the rage of the day. However, he developed an arthritic condition during the album’s tour and was forced to exit the band. A few projects came and went for St. John before drug problems caused a downward spiral leading eventually to a prison beating (allegedly for snitching on a drug dealer) and an eventual fatal overdose of methamphetamine in 2007.
Most casual fans saw St. John only once, in the video for the album’s hit single “Heaven’s On Fire.” That song is the best known—indeed, even for most KISS fans, the only known—song from Animalize. This catchy hit, KISS’s second successful Stanley collaboration with ‘80s hitmaker Desmond Child, reached #11 in the US and saw heavy rotation on MTV. That video shows a band that could be any hard rock band in 1984: four heavily made-up men in black-and-white themed, garish clothes with fringes and tiger stripes, miming their song on nontraditionally shaped guitars.
But it’s telling that even the standout doesn’t stand out, but fits in. The rest of the album is fine, even decent, as an imitation of the glam-influenced hard rock of the mid-80s. It retains some of the heaviness of the previous two albums, but less convincingly so. Never overly gritty, this album is downright slick. Worse, the songs are generic.
While the album had more immediate success than its recent predecessors—it reached #19 in the US, went platinum, and sold better than any KISS album since 1979’s Dynasty—it quickly faded into relative anonymity.
On a personal note, three or four years after its release, this KISS fan knew the album almost exclusively as “the one with Mark St. John and “Heaven’s On Fire.” The cassette never wore out, never got tangled in the cassette deck, because it sat mostly unplayed. Only one KISS album appealed to that teenage boy less. We’ll talk—briefly!—about that one soon.
Creatures of the Night and Lick It Up showed KISS finding their footing for a new decade and even beginning to regain some degree of commercial success after the rough patch bridging the ‘70s to the ‘80s.
Those years were also tumultuous. First came turnover on the drums with Peter Criss giving way to Anton Fig for two uncredited albums before being replaced by Eric Carr. Then guitarist Ace Frehley faded as uncredited session players took turns on a few several albums before Vinnie Vincent became the band’s second official guitarist.
Vincent proved unable to work with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons: a great guitarist, he seemed unwilling to play anything but a leading role. In this band, that was not going to happen. He was unceremoniously replaced by a brilliant but troubled talent, the virtually unknown Mark St. John.
St. John had been a guitar teacher in California before joining the band, and delivered a then-current style blending the speed of Vincent with some of the Van Halen-inspired tapping and whammy bar techniques that were the rage of the day. However, he developed an arthritic condition during the album’s tour and was forced to exit the band. A few projects came and went for St. John before drug problems caused a downward spiral leading eventually to a prison beating (allegedly for snitching on a drug dealer) and an eventual fatal overdose of methamphetamine in 2007.
Most casual fans saw St. John only once, in the video for the album’s hit single “Heaven’s On Fire.” That song is the best known—indeed, even for most KISS fans, the only known—song from Animalize. This catchy hit, KISS’s second successful Stanley collaboration with ‘80s hitmaker Desmond Child, reached #11 in the US and saw heavy rotation on MTV. That video shows a band that could be any hard rock band in 1984: four heavily made-up men in black-and-white themed, garish clothes with fringes and tiger stripes, miming their song on nontraditionally shaped guitars.
But it’s telling that even the standout doesn’t stand out, but fits in. The rest of the album is fine, even decent, as an imitation of the glam-influenced hard rock of the mid-80s. It retains some of the heaviness of the previous two albums, but less convincingly so. Never overly gritty, this album is downright slick. Worse, the songs are generic.
While the album had more immediate success than its recent predecessors—it reached #19 in the US, went platinum, and sold better than any KISS album since 1979’s Dynasty—it quickly faded into relative anonymity.
On a personal note, three or four years after its release, this KISS fan knew the album almost exclusively as “the one with Mark St. John and “Heaven’s On Fire.” The cassette never wore out, never got tangled in the cassette deck, because it sat mostly unplayed. Only one KISS album appealed to that teenage boy less. We’ll talk—briefly!—about that one soon.