I'll give that to Ace: He has a weird style (especially rhythmically), but it's all his own. No one sounds like him by nature, Tommy Thayer just emulates him (and he does that well enough for stadium purposes) because he has been instructed to do so. Poor guy, his own guitar style is nothing like Ace's.
Ace is also one of the most unlikely Les Paul players around, he plays it as if it was a frigging Telecaster! But as I said: an original.
My introduction to Kiss was Dressed To Kill (followed shortly by Alive and Destroyer) - it struck me at the time that their music was nowhere near as heavy as I had expected it to be, more New York Dolls than Black Sabbath. But what appealed to me was that it was uncluttered, you could actually hear exactly what each instrument was doing. And it was pleasantly replicable, a secret to Kiss' widespread appeal, my first fledgling band covered C'mon And Love Me.
Of course, come Destroyer and its layered, symphonic "Ezrin Wall of Sound" that changed radically (not that I dislike Destroyer, I still think it's their Sgt Pepper), before they reverted back to type/re-dumbed down with Eddie Kramer on Rock And Roll Over.
