Welcome back to final review in the series which is Part 6 of the 6 Part series. We have already talked about the Box Set and its packaging in Part 1 and we have covered Disc 1 and Disc 2 in the set. For those, we got about 20 unreleased tracks between those two. Quite impressive. For Disc Three, we only get 3 unreleased tracks and Disc Four we only get 2 unreleased tracks and for the final disc, Disc 5, we only get 3 previously unreleased tracks. As a result, I will also talk about the other songs on here to make it a fair representation.
For Disc 5, we only have 3 studio albums and some live albums to include on this set and not everything was great. As far as studio it is the fantastic ‘Revenge’, the lack of direction ‘Carnival of Souls’ and the reunion album ‘Pschyo Circus’ which not everyone played on so not really a reunion, but that is another discussion. You also get tracks from the MTV Unplugged album, The Detroit Rock City Soundtrack and some unreleased tracks. Here are the songs and I love how Eric Carr in Fox Makeup is the background!!
First up on the disc are four songs from the album ‘Revenge’ which is an album that saw Gene get comfortable in his skin again and gave us one of their heaviest albums since Creatures. It was fantastic. Out of the four songs, we get the demo of “Domino” which was written by Gene in 1991 for the ‘Revenge’ album. The demo is pretty close to the original song with some minor changes as the solo in the album version is played at a different key than the demo. It is a cool piece to the collection.
The next batch of four songs is from the MTV unplugged album. The first three tracks are with Eric Singer and Bruce and the last song, “Nothin’ to Lose” has Ace and Peter on it. I think all four tracks are great as is that whole album. With so few albums to pull from on this set, we are getting a lot of songs for each album which is part of the drag on this disc.
Next we get two tracks from the album ‘Carnival of Souls’ and to say this isn’t a good album is almost an understatement. There are some good songs from the album such as “Master and Slave”, but the songs chosen for this release are not my favorites. These don’t sound like Kiss songs to me.
Then we get four songs from ‘Psycho Circus’ and none are demos or anything rare. The song choices are fine it is just like I said earlier, four songs from one release is a lot and it would have been nice to have more unreleased stuff on this disc.
There is one cool song on here from an album I didn’t have which is the Detroit Rock City Movie Soundtrack. The song is “Nothing Can Keep Me From You”. I believe the song played through the end credits and was actually written by Diane Warren and not by Kiss. I enjoyed the track and this is the perfect set for songs like this to be on.
Then we get one of the most famous unreleased tracks, a song called “It’s My Life”. This song is one of the best on the disc and did you know Kiss played this live for the first time on the Kiss Kruise IX which was a month ago. The song dates back to around the time of ‘The Elder’ and was never fully finished. I believe it has all the original band members on this track was supposed to be on Psycho Circus, but as you know, didn’t make it.
The last two tracks are both live. The first one is “Shout it Out Live” from a show in 1996 and on ‘The Greatest Kiss’ album. And then a previously unreleased version of “Rock & Roll All Nite” because that was what we needed (yeah, no!). It was from 1999 and was later released on the ‘Alive! The Millennium Concert’ in 2006. For me, not much a great win as an unreleased track.
This disc had a few highlights for me with “It’s My Life”, “Nothing Can Keep Me From You” and “Domino”, but outside of that it was underwhelmed. There were too many songs from each disc and the Carnival of Song choices kind of sucked. I don’t ever need another version of “Rock & Roll All Nite”…I mean who does. I am going to only give it a 3.0 out of 5.0 Stars as a result. The 3.0 is generous, but I do love “It’s My Life”.
And now that we have all the scores from all 6 reviews, we need to tally up the whole Box Set and come up with an overall score. Here were the scores:
- Overall Packaging – 5.0 out of 5.0
- Disc One – 5.0 out of 5.0
- Disc Two – 4.5 out of 5.0
- Disc Three – 3.5 out of 5.0
- Disc Four – 4.0 out of 5.0
- Disc Five – 3.0 out of 5.0
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Overall Average Score – 4.2 out of 5.0 Stars
Check it out and let me know what you think. If you want to go back and read them all, click on the links below:
- The Box Set (Part 1 of 6)
- The Box Set – Disc One 1966-1975 (Part 2 of 6)
- The Box Set – Disc Two 1975-1977 (Part 3 of 6)
- The Box Set – Disc Three 1976-1982 (Part 4 of 6)
- The Box Set – Disc Four 1983-1989 (Part 5 of 6)
- The Box Set – Disc Five 1992-1999 (Part 6 of 6)
And that is the end!! I hope you enjoyed this 6 Part Series of The Box Set!
