So shortly before they threw the makeup back on and went back to mostly just stagnantly doing the same old stuff that made them famous in the 70s, KISS dropped the Revenge album.  By far the heaviest (and in my opinion, musically best) stuff they ever turned out (yeah, yeah, Destroyer, whatever, this is my favorite KISS album).  This bass-led little bit of creepiness from Gene even got some radio play back in the day.

Actually several of the singles did decently, which has always made me wonder what could have been, had the MTV Unplugged performance not prompted 20 years of regression.  I love classic KISS too, don’t misunderstand me, I just would have liked to have heard more stuff like this too (also I had a massive crush on Eric Singer and now they hide him under Peter Criss’s makeup, which makes me sad).

BONUS FEATURE:

So I’m sitting in an Augsburg bar in 1997 or so when my buddy and I think we hear this come on the sound system.  We start singing and headbanging along only to realizes it’s a German cover.  In memory of some fun times I also present Die Ärzte:

I actually saw these guys open for KISS during the reunion tour in Frankfurt in ’96, but didn’t know they were the ones that had done the German cover until years later.

Introduction to the Monster, Monster series here.