ASH: FREE ALL ANGELS (2001)
1) Walking Barefoot; 2)
Shining Light; 3) Burn Baby Burn; 4) Candy; 5) Cherry Bomb; 6) Submission; 7)
Someday; 8) Pacific Palisades; 9) Shark; 10) Sometimes; 11) Nicole; 12) There's
A Star; 13) World Domination.
Lighter, faster, less folksy, but more actively
rock'n'rollish than Nu-Clear Sounds
— I have almost taken a liking to this album, despite the obvious fact that
this is still very much an Ash album, and that Tim Wheeler is not the Pete
Townshend of his generation and will never be. However, each time that his
inner «Heavy Lead Monster» goes to sleep and the «Light Magnesium Elf» takes
over the watch, the sickness wanes and the music becomes listenable — and, in
places, even highly enjoyable. This is one of the better samples.
The early parts are not particularly promising.
ʽWalking Barefootʼ starts things off on a happy pop-punk note — fast,
frivolously romantic, but generally hookless and flat; and the five-minute long
ʽShining Lightʼ is optimistic enough not to get condemned as generic depressed
alt-rock crap, but just as flat and predictable («now we are relatively
quiet... now we SUDDENLY become loud as heck... what else do you need to get
it shoved down your throat?»).
However, already the third track, ʽBurn Baby
Burnʼ, lights up a little candle. A nice picking pattern, a fast rumbling bass
line, a «choppier», livelier rhythm, a slightly less trivial chorus, a classy
trill-based solo — is this an attempt to put the fun back where it belongs, or
what? ʽSubmissionʼ builds up a hot funky groove whose principal hook (an
electronically treated "you turn me on...") may irritate you, but
that wouldn't make it any less of a hook. ʽPacific Palisadesʼ is the next entry
in the ongoing series of Beach Boys / Ramones tributes, and arguably the best
one so far —lyrics like "I lie with candles by my bed / Brian Wilson in my
head" may be a bit too obvious, but the chorus resolution is still
tremendously uplifting. ʽSharkʼ brings back the aggression in the form of a
deep guitar tone, pitch-torturing effects, and vocals pressed into an ugly
sneer on the "violent mind, violent mind" chorus. And so on.
The sentimental domain of the album generally
comes in the form of loud, but not particularly «power-loud» ballads, usually acoustic
or joint acoustic-electric in form and more often than not backed up with a
thick layer of fake strings — sometimes emulating actual strings and sometimes
bringing back Mellotron memories (ʽCandyʼ). I cannot see any great discoveries,
but, considering that ballads are a dangerous thing altogether, Wheeler gets
off all right this time. The "was it a dream I had..." bit on
ʽSomedayʼ even manages to have a special ring to it. ʽSometimesʼ sounds like
Blur on a cloudy day, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
A decent affair altogether, and it succeeds in
lifting a small corner of the «alt-rock curse» which lay heavily all over Ash
all through the 1990s: on more than one song here, they let in a little bit of
sunshine, and do not seem so genuinely eager to honor the limited array of distorted
rock guitar clichés of the genre. Of
course, it also has to do with all sorts of other
honorings: from the Beach Boys to the Jesus and Mary Chain, almost every one of
these songs could be deciphered as a sum of several influences. But if you ask
me, it's better to be inspired by the Beach Boys than the Stone Temple Pilots,
regardless of who you are and where you stand.
A touch of experimentation, a drop of
diversity, a smudge of lightness and poppy optimism, and Free All Angels may even be a better album than 1977, if not as historically important
— but then again, is there anything about Ash that will seriously look «historically
important» ten years from now? Thumbs up, in the meantime.
Check "Free All Angels" (MP3) on Amazon
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