Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Vista Records | |
| Robert Christgau | (B-) |
| Blender | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Pitchfork Media | (10/10) |
Alive! received positive reviews and has sold over nine million copies, making it Kiss' best selling album and one of the biggest selling albums of the 1970s. Greg Prato of Allmusic rated the album four-and-a-half stars out of five and stated that "Alive! remains Kiss' greatest album ever." Erik Rupp from Vista Records rated Alive! five out of five stars. He stated that the album "never lets up" and that "KISS sounds like a freight train roaring down the tracks at top speed." Robert Christgau rated the album a B-, stating that he and "the multimillion kids who are buying it" "fall into neither category" of those who regard the album "as a de facto best-of" and "those who regard it as the sludge."
In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, the album was rated four out of five stars. It was called "a nonstop Kiss-krieg of two-note guitar motifs, fake-sounding audience noise, and inspirational chitchat", but it was then restated as the next best thing to being there, clearly. Jason Josephes of Pitchfork Media rated it ten out of ten points and said that "the album may seem like a joke, mainly because it contains every arena rock cliche in the book", but called it "total sonic proof of Kiss climbing their apex".
Alive! peaked at #9 on the album charts, and charted for 110 weeks, by far the longest in the band's history. In 2003, the album was ranked #159 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2006, it was placed at #26 on Guitar World magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Albums of All Time. In 2009, the same magazine placed it at #3 on their list of Top 10 Live Albums.
Read more about this topic: Alive! (Kiss Album)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)