You can take the boy out of The Bronx, but can’t take The Bronx out of the boy.
Ace Frehley, Kiss guitar legend, gives birth to some of his finest cuts and hottest licks with the fret-burning, string-bending, grin-inducing 10,000 Volts (MNRK Heavy).
Frehley is all about flash and ability … AND balls! A towering, thundering hulk of LEGACY, this album proves class is permanent, each of the eleven tracks blessed by at least one wild solo.
Lovers of that signature sound will be in Gibson geetar, seventies Marshall amp heaven (with a few Fender Strats among the riffs and rhythm mayhem).
“Cosmic Heart” is a “God Of Thunder” epic with a gut-punching riff and superior, dramatic lyrics, while “Cherry Medicine” (still got that cough, Ace?!) boasts a glam stomp, hooky chorus and so much more. The overall sound is hard but poppy, heavy but oh so light, and fun, fun, fun.
The propulsive “Fightin’ For Life” might have you punchin’ the air and fightin’ for breath. Cowbell punctuates “Walkin’ On The Moon” and others, including “Blinded”, with its a capella intro, as the hits keep on coming (co-songwriter and producer, Steve Brown, of Trixter, take a bow).
In the Space Ace universe, girls are “Constantly Cute” (rhymes with “pursuit”), “not just another toy”. Black leather is preferable, stopping traffic is recommended. He is SO not woke, it ain’t funny … it’s hilarious!
It’s all capped off by the soulful, celestial sustain of finale instrumental, “Stratosphere”.
Is this album a tad “old-fashioned”? For sure! Is it dumb? You called it buddy, not me, and I wouldn’t say it to his 72-year-old face (boy, Bronx, etc).
Yes, we could rock and roll all nite before there was Kiss (formed 1973, dontcha know?), but once the hotter-than-hell tectonic plates had shifted and the dressed-to-kill Spaceman properly came to the party, he shocked me and destroyed us all. Everything was magnificently magnified, crazily cosmic, thanks to a smokin’, stadium-filling, starry-eyed messenger of the Rock Gods.
This is the guy who penned and eventually warbled many of the Kiss Army’s fabled favorites, who put the “awesome” and “dynamic” into “autodidact”, a self-taught master, changing Blues-based rock guitar forever. As he himself would admit “freely” (geddit?), there are better players out there. But how many took on the six-string struggle and picked up an axe inspired by his (Les) Paul Bunyan-sized chops?
And don’t forget THE VOICE. Again, there are better singers, but Ace is always for real, always human – fantastically fallible, endearingly emotional.
There has been talk about how this album could make former bandmates Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons “look like imbeciles”. Competitive? Can’t take the Bronx out of the boy. But his tenth (including the Frehley’s Comet stuff) solo outing doesn’t sound like a tit-for-tat, “cram it” album. First and foremost, it’s a great rock ’n’ roll record. Sela.
You can take the boy out of the Bronx, but he’ll always be in the “New York Groove”. As he sings on 10,000 Volts: “I’ll never give up, or slow down …”
Ace once described the Kiss modus operandi thus: “We put on a dynamite show, totally overwhelming the audience.”
10,000 Volts, in its own time, in its own way, is similarly staggering – quite simply, OVERWHELMING.
Buy the album here:
https://acefrehley.ffm.to/10kvolts
10,000 / 10
CALLUM REID