Arriving to the "hidden epoch" of Kiss, it lays there like a dark diamond their album "Music from the elder", that is actually soundtrack for an inexistent movie. The shifts that the band's musical direction was experimenting, from the old straightforward hard rock, to the semi-disco years, and finally "The elder", was huge, and fruit of a flickering yearning to stay popular, or at least alive among the world's top rock bands, more than due to real artistic evolution, I assume: with this Lp they tried to make a move towards the "important" music, showing themselves "conceptual", if in Kiss' terms is possible this word. The sales were very poor for the Kiss standards, and they even avoided start a promotional tour, so explained in words of Gene Simmons: "As a Kiss record I'd give it a zero. As a bad Genesis record, I'd give it a two." Well, Simmons is wrong; the album is excellent, there is not a single filler in here, maybe it could be quoted "I" and "Mr. Blackwell" as the weak songs, but the rest is pure gold. Of course, Gene thinks with his pocket; and doesn't even realize when makes something really good, trying to bury it asap, like a dog buries the faecal substance after take a shit; and why? Because it was too good to sell. Edgar Allan Poe said once something like that there is not worst torture for a sensitive soul, than being taken for weak due to its misunderstood excess of strength or excellence; well, something like it happened with this creature "The elder", a son that the big-blind guys of Kiss and their huge materialistic ego, never wanted to recognize. The album was produced by the guy who produced the best Kiss albums: this one and "Destroyer"; yes, that old Bob Ezrin; individual who produced Pink Floyd's "The wall", nothing less, and worked in the best albums of Alice Cooper, Lou Reed's "Berlin", the first Peter Gabriel solo album, among many many others. Here Ezrin is co-author with some members of the band, of several tracks as well; and some others were penned in collaboration with the very Lou Reed, such "A world without heroes", "Mr. Blackwell" or "Dark light". This album is quite varied, and besides the logical hard rock, features strange epic songs, like "Under the rose" or "Odyssey"; and even some medieval air in "Just a boy". I think that if this album wouldn't exist, I would like Kiss much, much lesser than I do; and at some point, I'd even risk that this Lp justifies their whole career.
