The year off for the four members of the band to produce their own solo albums, followed by the next Kiss album “Dynasty” had also seen some changes. With the music world swirling between punk rock and disco, along with the rising of new wave and a new movement in hard rock and heavy metal, Kiss had chosen to infuse the disco craze into their album, which saw a divide in old fans and new fans as to what they were feeling about where the band was headed. The tour to promote the album, dubbed “The Return of Kiss” proved a disappointment in their home country with a marked decline in attendance, and yet their popularity in Europe and Australasia in particular grew with that album’s sound. The glam and disco styled outfits donned on this tour also proved to be polarising amongst the fan base.
Tensions within the band were also reaching a crescendo. Peter Criss had been unable to perform on the “Dynasty” album due to injuries received in a car accident, and on the tour that followed his drumming had noticeably eroded, to the point that he intentionally slowed down or stopped playing altogether during concerts. It was something that would need to be addressed. Ace Frehley was also offside with the band. His drinking was causing Paul and Gene frustration during interviews and in band situations, while Ace himself was beginning to question the direction the band’s music was taking.
The band spent three months at The Record Plant in New York at the start of 1980 coming up with the follow up album “Unmasked”, a title that just a couple of years later would become a prophecy fulfilled, but below the surface was perhaps as telling of this album than was known at the time. Because this was the beginning of a variety of changes that took place with Kiss over the next few years, as little by little the behind the scenes stories began to emerge and finally be unmasked themselves.
In many ways, "Unmasked” continued the trend where Kiss truly stopped being a band and became a revolving slate of solo members from a musical, with a number of outside influences involved in writing and performing, It wasn’t the first album that this had occurred on, but it did become a lot more prevalent on “Unmasked”, and the results on the album tend to be a little uneven.
As was the case on the previous album “Dynasty”, Peter Criss was not the drummer on the album. At least on “Dynasty” he had contributed to one song. Here on “Unmasked”, he is nowhere to be found. Anton Fig, who had played on the Ace Frehley solo album in 1978 and had then been recruited for the same role on the “Dynasty” album to cover Criss’s parts, was once again brought in to play drums on the album. And, it is fair to say that he sounds great, as he always does on whatever project he is on. Criss officially left the band with the release of this album and was replaced by Eric Carr as the permanent drummer of the band, a move that began to draw some of the strings back together.
When it comes to the writing and recording of the songs on the album, the same sort of tensions that had come since the solo albums period continued on. Ace wrote three songs for the album, one of those “Torpedo Girl” co-written with Vini Poncia. On these three songs, Ace again played all of the guitars and bass guitar as well as singing lead vocals on the tracks. Given Anton is playing drums here, these could easily just be an Ace Frehley solo album contribution. That’s fine, nothing wrong with that, but it’s hardly a band if members are not only writing songs on their own but also playing them on their own! In the same scenario, Paul contributes four songs to the album, all co-written with Poncia, two of which, “Tomorrow” and “Easy as It Seems”, he does an Ace by playing all of the guitars and bass guitar himself, while on “Shandi” he plays all guitars with the bass being played by Tom Harper. That means that Gene only plays bass on less than half of the songs on the album, something that is not an unusual occurrence through the history of the band, especially from this point going forward. He co-writes three songs on the album, all of which he sings. All of this gives the impression of three artists all writing their own solo albums, and combining them under the banner of Kiss, rather than the band Kiss writing and performing an album.
Then there is the one song on the album that is written by no one in the band, Gerard McMahon. Apparently, the producer had heard the demo of this song made by McMahon and enjoyed it so much that he brought it to Paul, who decided that he wanted to record it. Further to this is the influence of said producer Vini Poncia, who has co-writing contributions on no less than 8 of the 11 tracks. This would seem to suggest that he was influential in pushing the album’s direction towards a certain style, and as with the preceding album “Dynasty” it is reflected in the overall sound musically.
That opening track of the album, “Is That You?” sets a tone, one that does differ from what came on the previous album, and slightly differentiates what is to come. It’s a solid song that is not the kind of album starter that the band usually comes up with. Take a look at the Side 1 Track 1 songs from previous albums, and you’ll agree this doesn’t stack up against them – but perhaps more significantly, doesn’t give this album the starter it needs. Next comes “Shandi”, which if you live in Australia you know better than any other song on the album. It reached #5 on the singles chart in our fair land, which led to it being played live every single time the band came to Australia. Even on the last tour Paul still played it,.. and was surrounded by many adoring women... all as old as Paul himself. Anyway... it’s a perfectly fine ballad track that for me fits like a glove at the OJ Simpson trial. Ace’s “Talk to Me” follows, moving along the same lines lyrically as the opening tracks, but at least has an Ace solo within its boundaries to create some sort of excitement.
Gene’s “Naked City” has three co-writers, including Poncia and Peppy Castro, but also BOB Kulick, who also contributes extra guitar to the song. This is stylised very much in the pop genre of the era, much like songs written for movie soundtracks at the time. And yet, once again, Gene has found a way to make this an eminently enjoyable song, with Ace’s solo providing a lift as well, even though it is characteristically not what you expect from this band. Again, a solo track rather than a Kiss band track. Side one concludes with “What Makes the World Go ‘Round”, a song where parts remind me of ELO’s, “It’s a Living Thing”, and which for me encapsulates just where this album sits in regard to its genre and the style it has, because it is styled as pop rock, and that is definitely where “Unmasked” sits”.
“Tomorrow”, which opens side two, is pure pop rock, straight from 1980’s FM radio. It is noticeable too that Paul plays all of the guitars and bass on this track, because the one thing that would have lifted this song to a Kiss standard would have been an Ace guitar solo, but he doesn’t appear on this song and itis the lesser for it. It is pure treacle being poured over this whole track, and it definitely misses the harder guitar sound that would have given it a far better finish.
“Two Sides of the Coin” mirrors “Talk to Me” but with a harder rock friendly attitude, closer to what most Kiss fans would have been looking for on this album. Ace is always a favourite and while his vocals are sometimes only serviceable, he always induces more excitement in his songs through his guitar alone. Gene then comes at us with one of his typically themed songs “She’s So European”, one that is bouncy enough if you can ignore the almost AI written lyrics involved. “Easy as It Seems” is my favourite Paul track on the album, this one sounds much more like the best Stanley tracks that we know. He plays all guitars here again but has a nice little solo spot through the middle that enhances the song as well. It’s the tempo really, and his own backing vocals, that make this track one of the best here.
Unlike his other two tracks which he wrote by himself, there is a funk disco feel about Ace’s “Torpedo Girl” that feels as though it has been overtly influenced by the co-writer of the track. It seems so far out of place on this album, on what has come before it, even for an album that is posturing for the marketplace of the era. The album closes out with Gene’s “You’re All That I Want”, one which lyrically once again you can guess the way it is heading by the title. It’s another track that in the modern age of AI you can imagine that computers would have little difficulty in transcribing a Gene Simmons song on the basis of lyrical content.
Kiss. Would you like my backstory again? If you are coming in late to this podcast, here’s the short version. My eldest cousin was a huge fan of Kiss at about the period this album was released, and whenever we visited my grandmother with whom he was living at the time I would see and hear Kiss all the time. I knew “I Was Made for Loving You” through wining a dance competition at school to that song. And my first true discovery of the band on my own terms was through the album “Crazy Nights”. It is a tale that has been fleshed out more thoroughly in past episodes here and on my previous podcast. No doubt it will come again very soon as the next album reaches its anniversary.
As to this album, it wasn’t one I heard until I began to go back and find all of the albums in the Kiss discography. “Unmasked” for me came up about the time of the great reunion in the mid-1990's, when there came a chance that I might actually get to see them live in concert. What were my thoughts? Yeah, it was fine. I didn’t jump out of my skin about it, it didn’t have much that I was looking for at that time. I listened to it, and then when it came to my Kiss fix it was back to those albums that I truly loved. And on the few occasions over the years that I have listened to it my thoughts have never really changed. It was okay, when I put it on I could listen to it, but there was nothing that blew my mind about it.
So we come to the past two weeks, when my CD has again come off of the shelves and returned to my CD player. What did I expect to find when I pressed the play button this time? To be fair I was looking forward to listening to the album again. Through the course of my podcasting on my album collection, “Unmasked” is one of the last albums that I have come to over the almost four year period I have been doing this, which means that I have listened to almost all of the Kiss discography at some point over that time period, and this is one of the final pieces of that puzzle.
What did I find? I found an album that has noticeable flaws, that has the cracks opening that would eventually very soon see changes within the group and the band and its music. It is an album composed of its time, by individuals who perhaps were only held together by the vision of a producer who through his own intervention and/or contribution gave the album a contemporary sound that may not have agreed with the old fans but maybe was able to attract the younger fans. Whether any of that is true or not I cannot confirm or deny, it is more or less what I have gathered from listening to the album and reading books and articles from the time period.
For my own tastes, “Unmasked” is an average album. I don’t think it is a bad album, but it also isn’t a great album. It doesn’t have anything that jumps out and grabs you by the throat, and makes you want to play the album over and over. There are some good tunes, there are some nice riffs, there are some reasonable passages of songs that get you in the Kiss mood. It’s just that it doesn’t have the material or performances that push it to the being what I’d consider better than average.
There are 20 studio Kiss albums. For me, this one ranks at #15. It’s okay. I don’t mind listening to it. But I’ve now listened to it 12 times over the last couple of weeks. It is really time for me to try something else, something that makes me excited about listening to music again.
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