A rock opera following the recruitment of a young hero into the Council of Elders, a secret society that fights evil. The Boy is guided by an elderly caretaker named Morpheus (yes, really) as he goes on a journey to battle evil.
I think that the reason why the album wasn't well received at the time was because the label shuffled the track listing in a way that resulted in the story not making sense, which is kind of a determent if you want to, you know, release a rock opera. Also, I think placing "The Oath" at the start of the album misled KISS fans as it's one of the tracks that falls more in line with KISS's traditional hard rock style, as opposed to the orchestrated progressive rock style they were going for on the album. Post-1997 releases on CD, vinyl and digital downloads corrected the track listing to the original order which made the story more comprehensible.
Even putting aside the story of the album, I don't think musically this was deserving of the level of vitriol it received from KISS fans at the time. The band tried something different musically and lyrically, and I not only think that changing up the formula paid off, but I don't think this was such an out of pocket departure to warrant such vitriol. I think people forget that glam rock had roots in art rock, and while KISS more often played into the rock and roll side of the genre, the Kabuki theater inspired makeup and comic book inspired approach to the band clearly demonstrates an inherent art rock root to KISS as performers. So what if now there's a Medieval fantasy story to this and synthesizers and orchestral strings running throughout and a couple of songs cowritten with
Lou Reed? This is as much of a KISS album as any of their other releases, and it's actually the KISS album I've listened to the most.
It also has a bit of an analogy to
The Rolling Stones' '60s art rock album
Their Satanic Majesties' Request, which was another radical departure from a more traditional rock and roll formula into more experimental and ambitious territory to a tepid initial response from fans and critics, only to find more praise, fans and admiration overtime. Matter of fact, KISS themselves even covered one of the
Satanic Majesties songs, "2,000 Man", two albums previously on
Dynasty.
Of course, releasing a progressive rock album, and a rock opera at that, was definitely out of step with prevailing musical trends in the early '80s, after the public had rejected prog and embraced punk, and the punk rock musicians' general growing ambivalence towards punk had led to punks embracing prog influences for post-punk and new wave, but who wants to be typical and do what everyone else is doing? There's this general perception of KISS as chasing trends what with
Carnival of Souls being compared to a grunge album and
Dynasty being perceived as a disco album despite only really having one sort-of but not-really disco-sounding track (the hit "I Was Made for Lovin' You"), but it was definitely not popular in 1981 to either play prog rock or put out a rock opera (and most prog bands were embracing new wave and synth-pop around this time).
Music from "The Elder" was a departure, but not one in favor of a musical trend that was
currently popular when they started writing and recording it. So why does KISS keep getting written off this way, as if every change up to their formula is chasing a trend? For that matter,
Unmasked, the album before this, was the most glam rocky of their catalog. There's nothing that could ever convince me that
Music from "The Elder" deserved the level of hate it got decades ago. It really feels like NPC mentality to hate this album.
