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This review of Rock or Bust originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, Dec. 4, 2014.
AC/DC may have a few problems (drummer Phil Rudd faces drug- and assault-related charges, and founding rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young has retired owing to dementia), but you’d never know it from Rock or Bust.
Few bands besides KISS and Iron Maiden are known more for their iconography than their music.
KISS may have transformed their fans’ nostalgia into big bucks, but as Maiden show on Dance of Death, they seem to want to prove their fans right in thinking they are still relevant.
As the founding guitarist for KISS, you’d expect Ace Frehley to have some pretty good war stories — if he can remember them. A self-confessed party animal, Frehley has been open about his addicitions to alcohol, cocaine, and painkillers. But as he shows in No Regrets, his memory for a lot of things is just fine.
Frehley and original KISS drummer Peter Criss have been largely written out of the band’s official history over the years — at least, to hear Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley tell it. So it’s refreshing to hear the story of the band from Frehley’s point of view.
Founding Kiss drummer Peter Criss has been promising to release a tell-all autobiography for decades, and now he’s finally done it. (Ironically, it comes a year later than fellow Kiss founder Ace Frehley’s No Regrets.) The question is whether what he has to tell illuminates anything about the early years of Kiss or his life after he quit the band in 1980.
If you want to understand why glam metal was so popular in the late ’80s, you should listen to a band that had more bite than Poison and better sense of the absurd than Cinderella, which is to say: Faster Pussycat.
Named for the Russ Meyer movie Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! the band was just as ludicrous and awesome as its namesake. On its debut album, the band is rough, cocky and a hell of a lot of fun, whether their lyrics are making sense or not.
Okay, this isn’t a new song, but it is Christmas, and it’s miles better than just about everything on the last heavy metal Christmas CD I listened to. I present The Darkness with “Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End).”
If you’re not a fan of The Darkness (recently reunited with a new album out… which is on my Christmas list), then please, click on, click away, hit your back button, or read what I’ve been saying about hobbits.
But, if you’re tired of sappy-sweet Christmas tunes (and as much as I love some of them, you do reach the point of total saturation), here’s something nonsensical, melancholy, loud, and more than a bit goofy.
