BARBED WIRE

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Link rings in the new century with BARBED WIRE.  Although it's a "new" release, it was actually recorded in 1995, with about half of the cuts with the guys from the Ace-Tones (now Link Wray and his AceMen) - the same guys who played with Link on SHADOWMAN, WALKING DOWN A STREET CALLED LOVE and the RUMBLEMAN video.

The other half of the songs are just Link and an acoustic guitar, singing some of his favorite old standards.

This release is fantastic, due to the fact that half the songs are the guitar heavy Link standards, along with some acoustic vocal stuff!

TIGER MAN
JULIE BABY
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
HARD ROCK
BARBED WIRE
YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL
JAILHOUSE ROCK
SOMEBODY LIED
LOVER COME BACK TO ME
SPIDERMAN
RUMBLE (live in 1996)
BORN TO BE WILD
FIRE (live in 1996)

REVIEWS
from Goldmine Magazine

LINK WRAY
BARBED WIRE

ace (CDCHD770) (British Import)

His 70th birthday passed him by a while back.  Yet, Link Wray remains an unregenerate rocker clad in black leather, his hair still worn defiantly long and his sledgehammer guitar histrionics cutting just as deep of a hard-rock incision as back in 1958, when his stroll accessible instrumental "Rumble" unleashed the concept of power chords on an unsuspecting nation.  

Now living in Denmark with his manager wife (thought he tours our shores now and then), Wray's incendiary fretwork is as maniac and crunch as ever on BARBED WIRE, a compendium of 1995 studio sides and a pair of 1997 live efforts (a revival of his signature "Rumble" and a tough vocal treatment of Bruce Springsteen's "Fire").  The distortion levels are as stratospheric as Wray's fret speed on the scorching instrumentals "Julie Baby", "Barbed Wire", and "Spider Man", though a few surprising acoustic selections are interspersed - the introspective "Home Is Where The Heart Is", a slyly titled "Hard Rock" that's anything but, and a faithful reading of Elvis Presley's tremulous ballad "Young and Beautiful" - that stand in stark contrast to the heavily amplified pyrotechnics.

Presley remains sky-high on Wray's pantheon of cover sources: He also tackles "Tiger Man" and the ever-popular "Jailhouse Rock" on this collection, unleashing a functional vocal attack that's remarkable for a guy with one lung (he lost the other to tuberculosis well before he went pro with his axe).  If they're still picking at all, most of his contemporaries have turned their volume knobs way down by now.  Wray keeps blasting out hard rock riffs like a man possessed: His music is keeping him young.

-Bill Dahl

BARBED WIRE - Ace Records

Link Wray has a new album out, so there should be dancing in the streets, a general feeling of celebration, and a slew of new songs hitting the airwaves.  Right?...right?  Okay.  That’s not going to happen, but at the very least his latest album should get some positive publicity in the music press.

 Now aged 71, Link Wray is not likely to ever become a commercial success, but he will go down in rock’n’roll history as an original guitar hero.  A pioneer in fuzz tone and power chord rock, Wray was an enormous influence on artists as diverse as Pete Townsend, Neil Young and John Lennon.

 There’s been lot of Link lately:  Norton Records, of course, has been a leader in re-releasing Wray’s oeuvre from the Swan era and making the public more aware of his music.  Key Wray tunes can be heard in movies like “Pulp Fiction” and “Johnny Suede.”  1997 saw the release of two albums:  the live Walking Down a Street Called Love and the studio Shadowman.  And even Rhino has recently released a compilation of the best of his early years.  But unfortunately, even though he has been recognized as an innovator, he still primarily  possesses cult status, and excepting college radio stations, gets no airplay.

 Barbed Wire is Link Wray’s latest release, but curiously, the music is anything but new.  With the exception of two live cuts recorded in 1997, the whole album was recorded in 1995.  In and of itself that is not a negative, but prior to opening the CD one gets the feeling that Barbed Wire is a newly recorded album rather than a compilation of previously unreleased tracks Wray had recorded for Ace Records several years ago.

 Barbed Wire is a mixed bag, but in no way an unworthy release for a man of Wray’s reputation.  More restrained than 1997’s Shadowman, Wray even goes unplugged on several numbers, which is a treat considering he has rarely been heard playing the acoustic guitar since his seminal Polydor years of the early 1970s.  The true surprise of the album is a rich and beautiful acoustic rendering of the old Elvis Presley song “Home is Where the Heart Is” - culled from the Kid Galahad soundtrack for those who remember Presley’s Hollywood period.  Wray has, in the past, covered several Presley tunes - and on this album presents his own versions of no less than four of them.  “Tiger Man” and “Jailhouse Rock” in particular are high energy aural workouts - rather demented actually - and bear little resemblance to the Presley renditions.

 Standout tracks include the original instrumentals “Julie Baby” (most likely written with his wife Olive Julie in mind) and “Hard Rock,” while possibly his greatest new composition is “Spider Man,” also an instrumental, delivered in an uncharacteristically smooth and tremolo-laden fashion.

 Barbed Wire does have its share of disappointments:  the title track among them.  “Barbed Wire” is well played, but is nothing more than a remake of Wray’s  sixties rave-up “Run Chicken Run.”  The instrumental acoustic version of the old Romberg-Hammerstein classic “Lover Come Back to Me” sounds more like a home demo and could have benefited from the rich layering given to “Home is Where the Heart Is.”  The quality of the performance does, however, make one wonder what Wray could do with a full-length album in the unplugged format.

 And of course, just what we need - another version of “Rumble.”  It is true that Wray’s reputation will probably always be based on that one ominous cut from 1958 (and the closest thing Wray has ever had to a hit), but for some reason innumerable remakes have appeared in the Link Wray oeuvre over the years, none matching the intensity and spontaneity of the original Cadence release (he came the closest on his 1974 The Link Wray Rumble album).  This time around we are presented with a live version from a 1997 performance.  It is not exactly revelatory, but it is a better recording and performance than what was presented on the 1997 Walking Down a Street Called Love album (actually, there are two versions on that release).

 Barbed Wire is unlikely to win Link Wray any new converts, and in this writer’s opinion nothing Wray will do is likely to top the five brilliant albums he recorded for Polydor and Virgin between 1971 and 1974  (which stand as the pinnacle of his career as a creative artist), but it certainly is a worthwhile effort from a man who helped define a whole genre of rock’n’roll.  At any rate, one need not simply be a Link Wray fan to appreciate the fun and energy of this pioneer’s latest release.  Just be sure to turn it up!

Michael Paley, USA  

 

"They're Outta Here," says Archie - the long lost Link Wray Cadence recordings...IN STOCK NOW!!!