ASH: MELTDOWN (2005)
1) Meltdown; 2) Orpheus; 3)
Evil Eye; 4) Clones; 5) Star-Crossed; 6) Out Of The Blue; 7) Renegade Cavalcade;
8) Detonator; 9) On A Wave; 10) Won't Be Saved; 11) Vampire Love; 12*)
Shockwave; 13*) Solace; 14*) Cool It Down.
Wrong move. Some stupid jerk must have
complained that Free All Angels was
way too «happy» and «sissy» to match the honor of the proud sons of Ireland,
and incidentally shamed Wheeler into returning to the tough standards of Nu-Clear Sounds. The title alone says
it all: after «nuclear sounds», comes the «meltdown». An exaggeration, for
sure, but it does feel like the sickening radiation effects of the 1998 album
are back. Be sure to check your hairs after listening, or, better still, wrap
yourself in aluminium foil before
listening.
Something like nine out of eleven tracks on
here are moderately fast heavy rockers, most of them in such idioms as «pop-punk»,
«electro-funk», «slam-dunk», and «stinky-skunk». Their emotional pattern is
formally «aggressive», but with a heavy mix of sarcasm: as the title track
breaks in with "revolution, we're the solution, we're gonna take it to the
overload", Wheeler's sneer makes it clear that the aggression is as much
directed at the simplistic system-bashers as it is at the system itself. That's
fine by me — intelligence and sarcasm are always welcome in pop music.
What is not
fine is that the music has once again dissolved in a sea of well-coordinated,
but deadly boring noise. Guitar parts on ʽMeltdownʼ grumble, but never crunch,
or form a distinctive, individual riff. Repeat same phrase nine times,
substituting other track names, and you get an overall portrait of the album.
The vocal parts are slightly better, but still lazy — "I think my head is
gonna explode, I think my head is gonna overload" is a tense, but all too
familiar angsty trick, and it lacks gusto.
If the mood occasionally lightens up, it is
still not enough to pierce through the lazy haze. ʽOrpheusʼ, for instance,
goes from a gruff metallic verse to a «sunnier» power-pop chorus, but it's a
generic alt-rock chorus all the same — no particular inspiration detected.
ʽStarcrossedʼ is a particular shameful affair: the album's only slow-paced
ballad, sternly deprived of Wheeler's soft folksy hooks and turned into a
bland «power» show-off.
I wish I could concentrate more effectively on
some of these rockers and sort out the «hookless» and the «weakly-hooked» ones,
but it would just waste everybody's time, so let's just go straight to the
bottomline: Meltdown sacrifices
diversity and melodicity for a «kick-ass» approach, and the results can be
predicted accurately, because Tim Wheeler is about as good at kicking ass as
Meat Loaf is at singing opera. As in «it can be done, but why?...». Thumbs down.
P.S. Acquaintance with alternate reviews shows
that ʽClonesʼ is regularly being extolled as a particularly vengeful, raucous
highlight, if not even one of the best songs in the Ash repertoire. I beg to
differ. Flat lyrics like "Shame, that everyone's the same / I thought you
stood alone / We're different from the clones" are primitively bad on
their own, but it hurts twice as bad when they are set to a pedestrian funk
metal melody, further weakened by a muffled, overcompressed guitar tone. (Even
the Red Hot Chili Peppers could have given the song more liveliness). Take a
hint, people: if you want to write a song about loss of individuality, either
drown your lyrical content in Dylanisms or at least bother writing a melody
which only a ruthless troll could put down as a boring copy-paste affair.
Check "Meltdown" (MP3) on Amazon
This album is so horribly cheesy (So many anti-conformity lyrics you'd think it's a parody metal-punk band), but the songs are so very catchy. It's a fun, listenable album, but impossible to take seriously.
ReplyDelete