Pretty Cool For A Bunch Of Mimes: The Swim Army Reviews KISS
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Logo by Elias Amini, collage by moipk
My sprawling music taste is how I got into writing like this in the first place, but one band I still find myself constantly having to defend is KISS. I don’t support everything they’ve done, and I cannot stand behind every choice of notorious bandleaders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, but I will say that even 50+ years on, they are still unfairly dismissed.
If you want to quickly realize just how important KISS is, look no further than the tributes Ace Frehley garnered when he passed away. Every rock guitarist made a point to recognize him, more so than even Eddie Van Halen, whose band’s first record wouldn’t even come out until five years into KISS’ career. Finding an entry point for KISS can be hard if you only know their worst qualities, so I did my best to rally the Swim Team, ask for their favorite bands, and see if I could find a connection to the Hottest Band in the Land. Much like with KISS… results may vary.
– Logan Archer Mounts
Your Name: aly
Your Favorite Band: Animal Collective
Logan’s KISS Pick: “My Way”
Logan’s Notes: The only thing I know about Animal Collective is their use of keyboards, so here’s the most keyboard-heavy song KISS ever put out, for better or for worse.
Your Review: I’ve written in these very pages about how much I detest the shit clowns in Kiss (stylized as “KISS,” if you’re on Medicare), and you have the audacity to make me listen to their fourth album post-makeup-removal? You’re telling me they spent the late ‘80s making Simple Minds-ass, Wang Chung-ass swill? “My Way” shares too much with lowest-common-denominator radio run-off to be despicable, and that is its true offense.
The fact that career-low-point Kiss isn’t even a total trainwreck is sublime failure. How dare you make me listen to this just because “aNiMaL CoLLeCtiVe hAs kEyBoArDs.” Gonna strap Gene and Paul in the Punishment Chairs and make them listen to “Floridada” until they beg to be euthanized.
Your Name: Josh
Your Favorite Band: The Replacements
Logan’s KISS Pick: “Tomorrow”
Logan’s Notes: It’s well-known that The Replacements’ expertly sloppy “Black Diamond” cover from Let It Be is a highlight of their catalog. Too obvious to pick the original, so here’s a single from KISS’ underrated power pop masterpiece, Unmasked.
Your Review: I can’t tell if I like this. I think I kind of do? Half of the times I listened to it, I immediately zoned out and then woke up at the end, but when I really forced myself to focus, it wasn’t half bad. It’s kind of an empty-calories thing: externally, there’s a ton going on that’s really in my wheelhouse, but something’s missing at the song’s core, and because of that, it struggled to hold my attention. To make great power pop, I think an artist needs to convincingly portray themselves as pure at heart, and that’s a mighty tall order for Paul Stanley. I can’t deny he writes a killer hook; he’s just better when he’s grimy, like on “Strutter.” Now that’s a great song.
Your Name: Britta
Your Favorite Band: Pile
Logan’s KISS Pick: “Mr. Blackwell”
Logan’s Notes: Gene Simmons does not get enough shine for his bass playing, probably because he’s being criticized for most of the right reasons about everything else. But for fans of bass-driven post-punk bands like Pile, “Mr. Blackwell” from KISS’ prog foray (Music From) The Elder is a classic Demon track.
Your Review: It was really, really brave of Logan to assign me “Mr. Blackwell,” considering that the opening bass notes actually just sound like farts with reverb. (And they sound like that for the entire song, by the way.) In no universe do the satisfying bass lines of Pile’s music in songs like “Firewood” and “Grunt Like a Pig” deserve to be paired with KISS. What the heck is happening in the latter half of the song? Clicks, muffled vocals, and ghastly sound effects arise like a bloated ghoul (Gene, is that you?) only to cease as suddenly as they appeared. I was relieved when it was over, which is the sole thing that I appreciated about this track: it has an end.
Your Name: Braden
Your Favorite Band: The Brave Little Abacus
Logan’s KISS Pick: “No No No”
Logan’s Notes: The shreddiness, complexity, and energy of emo bands like The Brave Little Abacus seem far away from KISS’ hair metal days, but “No No No” from 1987’s Crazy Nights is a comparable feat of speed and frenzy.
Your Review: You could train 100 LLMs, make agents bicker until their GPUs need a smoke break, and they’d still never come up with “Actually, if you like Brave Little Abacus, you’d like this.” This is the type of recommendation—reach, comparison, whatever—that only a human could make; no, that only Logan could make. And the fucked up thing is he’s so right. The lyrics are… crazy, but the energy is incredible, and the shredding melted my face. Two comparably energetic sections are the opening of BLA’s “A Highway Got Paved Over My Future” and the beginning and end of “Bug Infested Floorboards.” If you put those sounds next to each other, it’s not much of a stretch at all.
It’s notable that this album is from the unmasked portion of KISS’s career, and BLA’s first album is “Masked Dancers.” What’s more remarkable, actually, is the rock ballad “Reason to Live,” with a pointed message that you can’t live your life for someone else, almost exactly the same as BLA’s “Can’t Run Away.” I think what I’m saying is that Logan made me realize that KISS might actually be emo?
Your Name: Taylor
Your Favorite Band: The Wonder Years, Sufjan Stevens, Yo La Tengo (take ya pick)
Logan’s KISS Pick: “Dark Light”
Logan’s Notes: Despite their loud guitars and big choruses, not much pop-punk to be found in the world of KISS, nor is there any orchestra or folk. They were always a bit too flashy to be alt-rock, but Ace Frehley’s “Dark Light” incorporates a bit of each rock subgenre of the day, which may align with Taylor’s picks.
Your Review: This feels like a safe space to admit that I am not only a KISS enjoyer, but that I had TWO posters of the band up on my wall through most of my young adulthood. That said, my knowledge and fandom of the band’s recorded music is basically limited to the 70s, aside from “Lick It Up,” so this is my first time hearing “Dark Light.” I’ll start with the positives: the guitar riff is punchy and sick, the solo fuckin’ rocks, and the chorus is kinda fun, but this does sound like theater kid Halloween music. RIP to Ace, but I don’t think his vocals are doing it for me here.
Your Name: Ciara
Your Favorite Band: Coheed and Cambria
Logan’s KISS Pick: “I”
Logan’s Notes: I didn’t go into this article intending to recommend a ton of tracks from the infamous (Music From) The Elder, but the anthemic rallying cries of Coheed songs ring true in the album’s closing moments of “I.” And it’s certainly better than Coheed’s “Love Gun” cover.
Your Review: The most KISS I've ever ingested was probably playing the “Hotter Than Hell” bonus level in Tony Hawk’s Underground as a child, which featured the band’s smash hit “Rock And Roll All Nite” on an endless loop. That was the most of the band I ever wished to be subjected to, but we all love Logan here at Swim Into The Sound, and I love a writing exercise. I also had a feeling the next biggest Coheed fan to me in our little family wouldn't steer me wrong.
Coheed fans know that big, anthemic 80s rock isn't a far stone's throw from the band, as their discography shows. “I” by KISS hits with a simple structure and powerful rhythm section that's easy to lose yourself in, but it eventually unfolds into the ethereal final moments of the album Music From “The Elder.” I was admittedly delighted to see the last lyrics on the track referencing “Rock And Roll All Nite,” which begs comparison to Coheed singer Claudio Sanchez's love for callbacks and referential lyrics. Strings swell and brass blares as characters dialogue with one another to close out the track, which would also feel right at home on most Coheed albums. A fun track, though I can't say this converted me to a KISS fan, sorry Logan. Happy birthday, bud! <3
Your Name: Caro
Your Favorite Band: Drive-By Truckers
Logan’s KISS Pick: “Mistake”
Logan’s Notes: Recently unearthed as an outtake on the Dressed to Kill box set, “Mistake” is an odd country ballad that sounds nothing like the down-and-dirty sound of the landmark album it was recorded for.
Your Review: I feel like I can’t shittalk this because it feels anti-DBT to shittalk KISS. The Truckers are believers in rock and roll, and who am I to say that some rock song from the hallowed 1970s sucks? Luckily, I only feel like I can’t shittalk and don’t actually care about if I do it or not.
This song is so close to rocking, but Stanley et. al. just can’t commit. I can’t even tell if they had fun making this or if the whole time they were like, ‘what are we doing…we can’t make dusty country sounds…’ If anything, I feel like this song predicted MTV 90s alt-pop, like the Lemonheads or Julianna Hatfield, rather than anything truly country-rock adjacent.
