Mercury Records - 1987
6.5/10
For the first time since the debut, Kiss would go a year without putting out a full-length. Two years following Asylum’s mild step forward, we get another mild step forward, finally utilizing the same guitarist twice since Ace Frehley. Crazy Nights is also the most pop oriented effort they’d ever release, once more leaning even further into that as the ‘80s progressed and going away from the metal tinges. Synthesizers become more obvious than they’ve ever been, and really, there’s hardly any signs of metal remaining at this point. Just look at that album art; it screams The Outfield far more than it screams Skid Row, much like the music.
The end result is once more, a few more songs that I’d call actually good, however we’re also given a few more that I’d call rather weightless. On the heavier front, we have “I’d Fight Hell To Hold You” being the only one with riffage that I actually think carries a strong gallop. Calling this heavy is a bit of a stretch, though, since the synths that glaze much of the album are still very present and there’s a lot of emotion. The attempts at the harder ‘80s tropes all fell flat, with likes of “Hell or High Water” and “Bang Bang You” being true insipid trash; the lyrics on the latter sound like a seventh grader who just discovered sex wrote them.
On the other hand, Crazy Nights does have a handful of pop tunes that I think fare better than anything on the album. The title track (sans one “Crazy”) is an anthemic opener, being the best of each of those we got on the past three records. “Turn On The Night” is loaded with synth sugar, an impressive chorus, and tight bridges that cake on the serotonin. A power ballad titled “Reason To Live” sounds like a glittery rewrite of Foreigner’s “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” but better written with even more emotion. I even love the keyboard leads on “My Way,” another one where Paul gets to exercise his range.
I definitely have some biases since I’m an ‘80s pop fool, but the entire record is really just a giant Paul Stanley flex over pop rhythms and a bunch of crap to fill in the gaps. It’s really tough to give overall thoughts, because the strong songs are really strong, but the weak ones are almost laughable. I think if Kiss had cut out like three tunes, and refined the remaining lesser ones to fit the general feel, this would have been on par with the classics. But as great as a lot of it is, a lot of it is also really tough to overlook. Still, I’ll take that over ten tracks that simply exist.
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