Former KISS guitarist Bruce Kulick recently spoke with VRP Rocks about the band’s darker album ‘Carnival of Souls,’ which he believes deserved more recognition from fans.
Kulick explained how the album came together, sharing that the band wanted to make a ‘darker and meaner’ record, even though Paul Stanley wasn’t fully on board with the direction. “The band was kind of confused, ‘Well, let’s make a darker and meaner KISS album.’ Paul got a bit disillusioned, didn’t really care for that stuff that much, but when it was needed for him to come up with a riff he writes ‘Master & Slave,’ a lot of the riffs in that and dialed it in. I co-write nine, I did nine songs, but that’s just because I locked myself in my room, drum machine, guitars, ideas, vibes, and just recorded everything and brought them to both of them.”
Stanley may not have been a fan of the record, but Kulick was proud of it: “We already worked on stuff so then it was just, ‘How can I warm Paul up to this kind of edgier, darker KISS and it worked. I know it’s not it’s a record that he’s not proud of yet for some fans they love it. So he’s entitled to that opinion of course, but I look back at ‘Carnival Of Souls’ and I just wish it was mixed a little differently but I’m still proud of it. I had my one vocal performance ‘I Walk Alone’ which was very prophetic at the time, but it’s a record that got so screwed.”
In another interview, Kulick also reflected on the band’s musical evolution, noting that Gene Simmons embraced the darker, grungier sound of the time. “I feel that music was really changing at the time, and it was getting darker and grungier. We know this, and I think that Gene was really embracing that stuff quite a bit. He liked some of that darkness that some of those bands had. He was attracted to the drop-D tuning and all those things, but Paul was not so sure. He was not a big fan of flannel shirts and all that.”
“So when we started to work on songs and this had nothing to do with the Reunion Tour, Gene was the one that was really writing and being creative and working on stuff, and I worked a lot with Gene. Eric [Singer] would be involved, and we would jam in these kinds of funky studios and come out of there with ideas. Some actually did make it to ‘Carnival of Souls,’ and some wound up on ‘Psycho Circus’ like ‘Within,'” he added.
Although the recording was interrupted by the Reunion Tour and MTV Unplugged, Kulick remained heavily involved in the songwriting process, contributing to nine of the tracks on ‘Carnival of Souls.’
