Gene Simmons
***hole

THE REVIEW

Many of you might wonder: "Is it a dream, is it a nightmare? Is the old Kiss bassist still capable of making an album? After all these years?"

Well yes, dream or nightmare as it may be, the demon with the long tongue and full of fake blood is back among us, and he tries to keep up with the times by choosing to create an album (that seems more like a session than an album) that pretends to be Hard Rock but in the end is a pop mix with a very kitsch backdrop and guitars smeared with distortions just out of the shop.

Dear friend Kulick returns on guitars, accompanied in "Firestarter" (a nearly admirable cover of the Prodigy) by Dave Navarro, another one who moves to play wherever there is the smell of money. In "Waiting for the morning light", written back in the day with Bob Dylan, we find the sweeter soul of the old bearded Gene, and we clash with his false psychedelic streak in the track "Black Tongue" where you can hear Frank Zappa emerging from his grave (like "Hot Rats") with guitar solos quite out of place in a CD of this kind.

In many ways, the album remains quite poor, incongruent and designed more for simple commerce than for some higher purpose (after all, Gene now only thinks about sex and money, nothing else!)

I am a die-hard Kiss fan, so I express my opinion on the album with all sincerity, which as you can see, even as a fan, I do not appreciate at all. I decided to review it precisely to show how, very often, our idols feel a bit too often in the power of producing works that the audience will buy solely based on the name of the artist.

How many flops have we seen in the history of music: the latest works of Deep Purple, the Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, the Eagles, Ozzy, and who knows how long the list could continue!

The verdict is yours.