Album review: Ace Frehley – 10,000 Volts

By STEVE MASCORD

AS part of the up-gamed social media hype surrounding the release of Ace Frehley’s new solo album, there was an engagement-hungry question posed somewhere: would this be his best record since the eponymous 1978 platter we all listened to in school?

They got me. I bit. “Of course not!” I commented. “The title track is catchy but repetitive.”

Now having had a few weeks to live with the entire album, I’ve come to the following realisation about the very nature of music: catchy IS repetitive. Also, repetitive IS catchy. They are the same thing. It’s only when something becomes ANNOYINGLY repetitive that it ceases to be catchy.

“10,000 Volts” the song is bloody repetitive but what am I singing to myself when I walk across the road to get groceries? “She hit me like 10,000 Volts, da-de-da”.

Or “I love you cherry medicine … you make me feel better when you’re in your black leather.”

Or “Fighting for life, fighting for life, fighting for LIFE!”

The problem many of us have in assessing the music of KISS members is that we first got onto them as children but we try to apply adult standards to their new material while giving the old songs a free pass when it comes to complexity and sophistication.

Steve Brown of Trixter, who worked with Frehley on this record, seems to to know this instinctively. Ace Frehley’s 1978 album was simple bubblegum rock about simple things: speeding back to one’s baby and being wiped out by alcohol and drugs at a party.

What Frehley and Brown have done here is narrow the focus of the songs and playing to a late seventies technicolour. This is not a HD experience; HD dilutes the Space Aces’s persona. It doesn’t survive modern scrutiny. They’ve done an album that won’t so much appeal to you as the 14 year old within you … if he’s still there somewhere.

“Walking On The Moon” is built on a simple guitar refrain which is repeated and repeated and repeated. “Cosmic Heart” beats only thanks to giant “God Of Thunder” riff that doesn’t try to be any more than it is. “Back Into My Arms” is a very agreeable and unoriginal mid-tempo love song. “Blinded” is dumb but like just about everything else on here, will hook itself into your cranium even if you are determined with all your being that it doesn’t.

“Constantly Cute” is the same and “Life Of A Stranger” is actually a rather classy blues rock pop song. “Up In The Sky”? A “New York Groove” rip-off!

I’m a huge fan of the Frehley’s Comet albums and Trouble Walking but this probably IS Ace’s best work since ’78. It’s a record with a mind of its own – not a big wise mind but a devilishly cunning one that is determined to burrow into your subconscious at any cost.

Buy 10,000 Volts on CD or vinyl