Latecomer to this surprisingly competent US band. Only heard their 2nd & 3rd albums so far, and I also have the next two to explore...but whereas I was expecting them to be a bunch of lightweights, there's actually some really strong, muscular stuff, particularly on On Earth. So I got to wondering why they didn't manage to emulate their illustrious labelmates' mystifying mega-success. They had obvious elements in common - garish costumes, barely listenable vocalists, atrocious lyrics - but that's where the similarities end. Musically, ANGEL were relatively sophisticated, and of course they were all quite attractive without the need for trowels of makeup - especially Punky, whose perma-pout elevated him to a level of natural beauty that PAUL the 'Love God' could only dream of, and even inspired Zappa to eulogise him. So, where did it all go wrong for ANGEL, who appear to be almost universally derided - compared to the more selective derision KISS attracts?
Didn’t one of them get rather close to Lydia Criss, causing a bit of trouble for Bill Aucoin (who managed both bands)? The problem may have been that Angel emerged just as Kiss were starting to go out of fashion, so it looked like they were hitching themselves to a bandwagon that was already leaving town. I was also surprised by how good they were. They are almost completely forgotten nowadays, though Zappa gave one of them a kind of immortality.
I don't think in the seventies hard rock lovers were going to drawn in by the effeminate presentation.
Having seen them in the 70’s and the reunion tour a couple of years ago, I think a large part of it was they were never taken seriously given their packaging. FM radio rarely played them and they were not the road warriors that Kiss were. It probably would have helped if they toured with Kiss but I believe they never performed a show with them. It also hurt that the material was inconsistent. The live live record might be their best one.
You say that, but...KISS? (Although tbh, outside of their fanbase, neither were KISS) On to White Hot now. Good, but um, Under Suspicion = Can't You Hear Me Knocking. Shameless!
Unusual post to start a thread...so do you like them or just started this for a laugh? Angel were far superior to Kiss in so many ways but alas they weren't dumb enough for the 70's arena rock audience to appreciate.
I can't work out if the main aim of your thread is to praise Angel or just trash KISS ? No room for Queen in there somewhere ?
Every thread has to start somewhere, not sure what you find so unusual? Yes, I like about 50% of what I've heard, although I'm listening to side 2 of White Hot atm, and so far it's kinda sucky.
I come to praise ANGEL, not to bury KISS. There are other places for that. What do you mean about Queen?
Queen are usually the other Forum punching bag. Apologies if I misjudged your opening post, but it had just as many disparaging remarks towards KISS as positive comments for Angel, so it just gave off a certain vibe. I'm not overly familiar with Angel's catalogue, so I might check it out.
You won't find me punching Queen - apart from the post-Freddie desecrations of the name, but nobody's interested in them anyway!
Within the comparisons to Kiss and why wasn't Angel as popular as them? Hard to say. I recently read the Doug Brod book They Just Seem A Little Weird (Hachette Books, 2020, New York, NY) Where he paralleled several bands including Kiss and Starz. I had wished he could have included Angel as I saw a moderate comparison to Starz. I would be interested in other opinions as to how Angel and Starz relate and compare to Kiss. For the record the book was pretty good and Brod did a good job intersecting the bands he cites in his book. From a historian standpoint I thought his conclusion was rushed, but overall a very schooled read.
I think Angel were stylistically all over the place as they searched for a commercial path. They started as a progressive-lite band, moved towards a harder metal sound, then backed off with a more power-pop approach. Always at least several hook-filled melodies per album (and mellotron!). I find the first album their most consistent, but I enjoy about half the songs on each of their follow-up albums. Unfortunately forgotten by many, but worth investigating now if you missed them the first time around (like me).
One stone cold classic of 70s Rock ( The Tower) is more than most bands manage. They were excellent musicians, but perhaps in retrospect, it comes down to two words - white satin.
I can safely say I had never heard of Angel until this thread, and when I did go search I was extremely underwhelmed by what I saw. Love or hate the music, one thing KISS had no shortage of, was charisma and spectacular presentation. They know how to put on a show and grab the worlds attention. Elsewhere in the world there were a number of mediocre satin glam bands around at the time and Angel certainly don't seem anything special, or a cut above the rest and its very easy to see how they got lost in the mix. Flash forward to a video in 2018 and there are a bunch of guys far too old to be wearing white satin suits squashed on a small stage and a guitarist who looks like he has had far too many procedures to his face and the music is still very mediocre. Fact is some bands simply haven't got "it", and Angel seem like one of those bands.....they should be lucky that 40+ years later they are still making a living playing rock n roll.
They were a favorite kicking dog of the US rock press at the time: Creem, Circus, RStone, etc., They were proto-pomp ala Journey, Survivor, etc., with a proto-glam/hair metal look.
I'm a big fan of Angel, by the way. They're one of my top "bands that should have been huge," along with a few other bands that had an Aucoin and/or KISS connection, including New England, Nantucket and Starz. I thought we already had a long thread on this awhile ago, but I'd have to search for it. Anyway, I know Punky Meadows largely blames it on them not being able to get airplay, but then the question just changes to why they couldn't get airplay . . . and there's no good, obvious answer for that. Punky likes to say that Zeppelin, KISS, etc. couldn't get airplay either, but that's not true. They may not have been on top 40 radio much, but that's not what they needed to be on for a promotional push anyway. They needed to be on the FM "album oriented rock" stations that were playing Zeppelin and KISS and so on. Punky says that money wasn't the problem--he said that Casablanca put a lot of money behind them. And I know Angel regularly had print ads for awhile in magazines like Circus, Hit Parader and Creem. If Casablanca were putting money behind getting Angel airplay, they should have been getting airplay--because the 70s were definitely still part of the era where you could easily buy/bribe your way into airplay (and chart position and so on). So that part remains a mystery. One of the problems might have been this: Punky notes that KISS wouldn't let Angel tour with them (not because KISS didn't like the band--they did), and he notes that when they opened for other artists, they often did so with decreasing support (like spotlights being taken away), and often wound up kicked off of tours before too long, because headliners were worried about Angel upstaging them--Angel was putting on a show and they were getting good audience response. So if headliners were making it difficult for them to do their thing, in that era when touring was a big part of building a fan base as a rock act, that would be a problem. And the KISS association would have hurt them there, because KISS had just done the same thing--started out as an opening act that was often blowing the headliner offstage, and rather quickly KISS turned it around so that they became the headliner and some bands that they'd been opening up for were within a couple years opening up for them instead. So folks were wary of letting that happen again. If Casablanca could have just put Angel on tour as a headliner in smaller venues, that might have worked, but (a) they weren't getting airplay that would have aided the success of that, and (b) in the later 70s, there wasn't quite the network of and tradition of smaller venues hosting rock acts that there is now. It wasn't common at that time for a rock act like Angel to go on a tour headlining, say, 1-3 thousand seat venues. Bands of that caliber went out as support acts for larger bands instead. Speculating on why word of mouth didn't build better, the fact that the band was rather rapidly evolving stylistically from album to album was surely part of the problem. Their first album has some significant prog influences, then the next album was more straightforward hard rock, then they started incorporating a lot more significant pop elements, and then they went almost kind of power pop, or "heavy soft rock"/"heavy yacht rock." That meant that a lot of people who liked the first album or two didn't like the subsequent albums so much. I like their entire stylistic journey, but probably most folks didn't. I'm not sure why they thought it was a good idea to change their focus so much so quickly, but it was probably largely at Casablanca's urging, because Angel wasn't producing any chart-toppers, and of course that's what Casablanca wanted. By the way, Angel is supposedly one of those bands who ended their career by still owing money to their record company. Part of it was bad timing, too. If they had come out a few years earlier, they could have more easily ridden the wave to popularity of of hard rock artists like KISS, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, etc. If they had come out a few years later (or stuck it out longer--although the collapse of Casablanca didn't help there), they could have more easily capitalized on the MTV era and they would have fit in well with hair metal bands. But also, in general, there weren't many artists as successful as KISS were. That sort of success is very rare. It's like asking why random bands weren't as successful as the Beatles in the 60s. The market can't support too many artists that are that popular. The bands I mentioned at the start of this post--New England, Nantucket and Starz--were also very talented, but none of them had significant success either. In fact, they were all less successful than Angel even. Not everyone deserving is going to catch on and become big stars. There's just too much competition for folks' attention for that.
While their music wasn't my thing, (neither was KISS), it was a combination of factors. The androgynous white satin look for one, a lack of radio acceptance/promotion, the "gimmick" not being as big a hit as KISS, & a lack of memorable hooks in their songs. Other than the image, the tended to lean more towards being a generic 70s rock band. And we had a plethora of those that didn't make a big impact. I'm not saying they were bad or untalented, just a dime a dozen type group.
I'm listening to the first album and of course I like it. Being myself a fan of pomp bombastic 70s rock (Kiss, Queen, Meat Loaf..) there's no way I wouldn't like this.
The main reason is the songwriting wasnt very good. They certainly got lots of advertising publicity in Hit Parader, Creem etc. An interesting point is that the bargain bins of record shops were stuffed with Angel cutouts for 10 years after their demise, so they for sure pressed enough copies. Another reason may be that rock was getting raw at that period with AC/DC, UFO, Nugent etc selling truck loads of records to a teen audience and even more poppy rock acts like Foreigner, Styx etc. still rocked a lot harder than Angel. From the image on the sleeves you guessed they were a wimpy version of Kiss before you even listened to the music.
