After a string of excellent albums, I recently decided to balance out my good fortune in promos by picking the next few completely at random. No cherry picking or known quantities, just spin my trusted D&D spinner and grab the nth from the list, consequences be damned! Last week the consequence was a glammy heavy metal album that faired rather poorly. This week, the consequence is… another glammy heavy metal album? What the shit, fate, that ain’t fair! But Kissin’ Dynamite is, in fact, a known quantity, and one that I enjoyed quite a bit at Graspop last year. So after Lokasenna and Huck, who respectively reviewed Ecstasy and Not the End of the Road,1 my number is up to give the overjoyed Germans their due and see whether they really are Back with a Bang.
Unsurprisingly, the band that previously garnered praise for catchy songwriting, clean execution and excellent vocals, have written an album full of catchy songwriting, clean execution and excellent vocals. From the moment the title track opens the album with the promised bang, Kissin’ Dynamite immediately shows a lived-in grasp of what makes good glam2 work; unbridled, earnest enthusiasm, and the sort of hooks that randomly take your brain-radio hostage for months afterwards like a less-lethal version of Bananaphone.3 This is the sort of quote-unquote metal you can jam on the aux at any party and not get kicked out. It’s stuffed with infectious joy and bright, sparkly, celebratory attitude. The choruses are stadium-sized, the riffs are clean as a whistle and it’s consumed as easily as a bag of chips.
Back With A Bang by Kissin’ Dynamite
Back with a Bang plays every trope and template of its genre to the hilt. Explosive opener. Slightly darker follow-up. Track filled with nostalgic, sunny camaraderie that reminds me of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” for some reason (“Raise Your Glass”). Not one, not two, but three songs about loving some woman, one with a bit more love (“Iconic”) and another with a bit more swagger (“The Devil is a Woman”). A completely realistic track about the amount of money, yachts,4 parties with superstars etc. they have (“More is More”), because glam is the most profitable music genre in 2024. And yes, this track has a vocoder section à la Bon Jovi “It’s My Life.” It’s a checklist, and does bequeath a ‘heard this before’ feeling throughout the running time. Which is fair: you have heard this before, about a thousand times since the 1980’s.
But an unoriginal album that is nonetheless written and played with uncommon excellence is still worth hearing, given you have sufficient tolerance for this level of cheesiness. At least 56% of the reason Kissin’ Dynamite works the way it does is the band’s primary haircut Hannes Braun. His powerful, soaring vocal performance is so chock full of honest spirit and joy, it’s hard not to crack a smile when he belts about all the good things in life, hitting every high note with seemingly no effort. Rounded off by a highly polished master, there’s not much stopping Back with a Bang from being the perfect metal album for a sunny beach party.
There’s nothing brilliant about Back with a Bang. In following all of glam’s usual tropes, it also stumbles into the usual pitfalls, like the ballad no one wants to hear (though “Not a Wise Man” is mercifully tacked onto the back and thus easily skippable). It’s cliched to the gills and glossy to a fault. But it’s so indomitable in its infectious joie-de-vivre, so packed full of earworms and so tightly executed, particularly in the vocal department, that I can’t but give Kissin’ Dynamite a wink and a thumbs up. If you need a pick-me-up this summer and don’t feel guilty about the pleasure of Provolone, you can do much worse than Back with a Bang.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: Stream | Format Reviewed: Stream
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: kissindynamite.bandcamp.com | kissin-dynamite.de | facebook.com/Kissindynamiterocks
Releases Worldwide: July 5th, 2024
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