Ace Frehley – Frehley’s Comet – 1987
It’s been a long time since I visited the Kiss Katalog. I had always intended on getting through the entire thing including solo discs but life gets in the way sometimes.
I had heard forever that Ace’s solo output outside of the Kiss Brand offerings were the best of the bunch. Is it true or was it some backlash hype?
Were it not for Ace’s guitar songs like “Rock Soldiers” would be relegated to hair metal status quo status. However, with Ace’s fingers offsetting his remarkably mediocre voice, the song is a welcome opener that would probably have found itself on the record shelf of every band member of Ratt, Warrant and the like. Except that, instead of leading those upstarts as he had on his solo Kiss record 9 years earlier, Frehley comes off as just another Hair Metal rocker. And he’s a little long in the tooth and late to the party to be effective.
On tracks like the dynamic “Breakout”, “Something Moved” and “Calling To You”, Ace recognizes his weakness and hands over lead vox to Rhythm Guitarist Tod Haworth. This allows a track like “Breakout” to be a feature for shredding and skin pounding. There’s no real song here, just some progressions to hang chops on. But it’s a thrill ride nonetheless. And “Something Moved” actually has the kind of energy that calls to mind the better days of Def Leppard, which is also evident on the sludge-glam “We Got Your Rock”. Elsewhere songs like “Into the Night” are so imbued with 80s compression and keyboards that they sound hackneyed and cliche now, if they didn’t back then. And I’m sure they did in 87 as well.
“Calling to You” is obviously designed to be a hit single and it’s not bad. By the end of the 80s this sound was dying. For what it is it’s pretty good and I could see cruising around on a Saturday night blasting this song on the way to the beach. It’s the theme for “Jersey Shore” if that show was produced 25 years ago.
The only weird experiment that almost succeeds but doesn’t quite is the bizarre “Dolls”. It’s a combination subject matter, approach and production that make it interesting to listen to while repelling at the same time. Occasionally Kiss would employ strange production tics that came out of left field, in this case it’s the children singing the chorus that threatens to take the song into horror show idiom but just comes off more as oddly perverse.
Frehley’s Comet isn’t as good as “Ace Frehley”. I’m not sure what went wrong, perhaps on that solo disc Ace was trying to preove himself to the other guys and this time out he’s got to prove himself to the world. He ends up trying to make a sellable product that comes off as boring and rote.
Grade: B-
ASide: Rock Soldiers, We Got Your Rock, Calling to You
BlindSide: Breakout, Something Moved
DownSide: Into the Night, Love Me Right
