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Ash - Meltdown The title of the new album alone makes it clear that Ash are going back to a purer, rockier sound for studio album number four. The opening riff from the lead, and title track reinforces this message the moment it kicks in with a compelling bark. Thinking back to the opening track on their 2001 album, Free All Angels, where Tim Wheeler had been Walking Barefoot all summer, the change in direction could hardly be more pronounced. But is it better?
Free All Angels wasn't just a really great album; it was also a really important album for Ash as a band, who had all reached their mid-twenties. It seemed to be where they really decided to grow up, and hone what they had just been dabbling with (albeit successfully) up to that point. It was a world, or, ahem, galaxy away from Girl From Mars territory, but still with that knack for a great hook and a harmony spliced in with the infectious guitars. Meltdown takes them further, but in a different way. Yes, on one hand they've 'returned' to rockier roots, and they still manage to sound fresh, but it's tighter and leaner than the sound they made as understandably excited teenagers on the brink of stardom and riches in the mid 1990s. Whether it's quite as good as Free All Angels is hard to say, but it certainly doesn't pause for breath as often.
The recent pre-emptive single, Orpheus, sums up the structure of the whole album quite succinctly. It starts with all-out rock, finishes with all-out rock, but is peppered with Tim Wheeler's unquestionable ability to write damn fine melodies in between. Melodies that have worked even better since guitarist and vocalist Charlotte Hatherley has been augmenting them. If this side of their repertoire is something that's put you off Ash before, then Meltdown still won't convert you. However much they crank up the guitars, Ash are in part defined by their well structured, progressive, and above all, tuneful songs. Their best work occurs when they combine those two philosophies of scuzzy guitars and catchy choruses, and there are several examples of that on Meltdown, whether it's the tumultuous rolling fog of Clones, or the military precision that backs up the singalong jumparound called Out Of The Blue. Indeed, Meltdown just might be their best work, in the sense that it seems to consolidate everything they've done well before, without lingering too long on the reflective moments they've been prone to at times. In the same way that the Manic Street Preachers can move you with their brilliant song structures, rather than their political rhetoric, Ash manage to produce their must sensitive moments when they're rocking out, not necessarily when they're turning the lights down low for a ballad.
If, on the other hand you do still like to hear the occasional lighter-waving track, coupled with that slightly adolescent lyrical naivety that only Ash can seem to pull off, then Meltdown just might contain one of their best slower tracks. Starcross'd is cliched, both musically and lyrically, but when a distorted sustained guitar is accompanied by Tim Wheeler doing his best impression of a romantic teenager, and is backed up with a melancholy descending chord pattern, you can forgive them for anything. Yep- even that rock version of the Cantina song.
Won't Be Saved is the only other track that peers gingerly down into the depths of Ballad Valley, before it grows into a layered, triumphant battle cry. For the rest of the time you'll be air drumming along to the more aggressive tracks like Detonator and On A Wave. But maybe that's where opinion will be divided. Ash can make you feel like an exuberant air-drumming teenager more so than any other band, but, naturally, many people will feel they've grown out of all that. Can it be as exciting for a 17-year-old listening to this rock band today, now in their late twenties, than it was when Ash were seventeen, and so were we? Personally, I hope it can. I mean, what else have the kids got to jump around ecstatically to today? There's just no way that Busted were born in 1977. Do you think they've even seen Star wars without the abomination of that CG Jabba the Hut?
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