The news has been out for a while that Kiss is releasing a new album Sonic Boom on October 6 and that it’s a Wal-Mart exclusive. It follows the same format as Journey’s latest one with a disc of new songs, a disc of new recordings of old songs, and a live DVD.
Normally I wouldn’t care about this except that I heard one of the songs off the album, “Modern Day Delilah” on Kissonline, and it’s awesome. I would guess I have around 75% of what Kiss has released although I wouldn’t consider myself a huge Kiss fan. They’ve put out a lot of bad stuff over their career and the past few years it seems like they’ve just been phoning it in. The last good album they put out was Revenge (although I do have a soft spot for Carnival of Souls) and after Psycho Circus came out I pretty much gave up on them putting out anything good. Add to that Gene Simmons’ recent quote that it wasn’t worth making new music any more and I had written them off as a nostalgia act for the rest of their careers.
I hope the new song is a sign of how good the rest of the album is. It would be great if they put out a solid album with an edge with the four members really playing on it (not just saying they were). Hopefully they’ll put a couple more songs online, but at this point I’m planning on buying it the week it comes out.
I started to get nervous the afternoon of the Chickenfoot show when I did a search for concert reviews (which I usually don’t do) and saw that with the exception of a couple of songs the band was sticking to their one and only album. With everyone’s background it didn’t make sense to do this, especially since I was hoping for at least one Satriani song as a guitar solo.
Well that turned out to be true but the show didn’t turn out to be as bad as I feared. The band sounded great together and gave the songs more life than they have on the album itself. One of the suprising things - for me at least - was how much the crowd was into it. The Uptown Theatre was sold out and I figured a lot of the people were there to hear some Van Halen songs and “I Can’t Drive 55″ but they were really into every song in the set. The band put on a great performance despite the questionable setlist.
The opener - Davey Knowles and Backdoor Slam - was fantastic. Again, I didn’t think the crowd would be into a relatively unknown opener but it seemed like most people were into them. Davey Knowles, the singer and lead guitarist, gave a dynamite performance and displayed some incredible guitar playing.
As for the venue, the Uptown Theatre isn’t a bad place to see shows, but the chairs they set out on the floor are absolutely horrible. I felt like I was in a middle seating flying Delta economy. At least the building was air-conditioned.