Angel 1975 Album

Angel

Angel was cast as the literal anti-thesis to Kiss – they wore white, angelic-themed outfits, mixed high-brow, quasi-progressive arrangements with hard rock, but otherwise, had the same basic aim as Kiss did – to take the country by storm using a flashy, pop-metal derived approach. It’s easy to peg this as a Kiss-meets-Styx kind of experience, then, but the guitar work and arrangements are far beyond anything Kiss even dreamed about doing at the time. “Tower” and “Long Time” alone have much more in common with the Todd Rundgrens and Argents of the day than a bunch of gorilla simpletons like Kiss. Angel’s problem was making this stuff interesting for anyone beyond stoned teenagers, which, by the way, was the same issue bands like Styx and Kansas used to have. Only when Styx and Kansas had crossover ballads and rockers did those guys start to have real success. It works better when the band sticks to more straight-forward power pop like “Rock and Rollers”, But more often than not, that is not what this album is about. So, in a technical sense, these guys had it in spades, but as far as this album goes, something gets lost in translation emotionally, that is for sure.