Customer Reviews

The KISS Album Focus: KINGS OF THE NIGHT TIME WORLD, 1972 - 1982

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I'm a KISS fan going on 24 years strong, and through the years, I've done a lot of reading up on the band. I've read excellent books, and I've read absolutely pathetic(and wildly inaccurate) garbage. The first volume of KISS Album Focus thankfully veers away from the latter column. Now, there's plenty of books that take on the band's history, but as the title indicates, this book that kicks off the K.A.F. series mainly aims to detail KISS' recording history. If you know nothing about the band's history, don't worry, you'll get all that here. But you'll get to know where and when each band member first cut a demo well before KISS was formed. You'll get to know what songs made it and what songs were discarded (which will usually show up in bootleg collector circles). You'll get to find out if the catalogue in Europe has any differences from the US catalogue. And amazingly, getting into primarily album related data for a book is not a dry read. The first K.A.F. chronicles the prototypical outfit of Wicked Lester which later evolved into...take a guess. And the book ends during the early 1980s period of misfortune and decline for KISS. Just read the chapter on The Elder, you'll understand. Julian Gill's K.A.F. is a good and informative book, but I seriously hope on future reprints, he does a better copy editing job because sometimes my brain shut down coming upon a passage with a glaring typo or a sentence missing (or including) words that turned portions of the paragraphs into nonsense. That is the only negative comment on an otherwise cool book. If I had to recommend anything else for the KISS fan who likes to read about the Hottest Band In The World, try KISS-Behind The Makeup and KISS Alive Forever.

All the masked era of the band is covered in detail with the original point of view of travelling through the albums. From the unknown four personas to a disgregating unity passing through all the stages every fan know. An easy way to know a little bit regarding each individual and an oportunity to get in just one book a real understanding of who's who (not only the Starchild, the Demon, Space Ace and the Catman but the people in the shadow who realli play in the albums). An exceptional data recollection transformed in a well written history.