As with society in general, the pandemic affected musicians in a variety of different ways, ranging from a full scale reappraisal of the reasons to carry on to writing multiple albums worth of new material. A wide ranging, fifty four track Ash retrospective Teenage Wildlife dropped just before everything lockdown-related kicked off in early 2020, the impression being that of a chapter closed.
This turned out to be true, just not the way many people could’ve predicted. Maybe it was time for change: the Northern Irish trio after all had always written songs which rarely veered from a pop-punk template first heard on their debut 1977, a turn they reprised in full from inside a studio in lieu of the anniversary tour the rules had cruelly denied.
Race The Night is their first collection of new material since 2018’s Islands and is long on what you would expect – bubblegum noise, guitar rifferama and singer Tim Wheeler’s perma-teen vocal style. But whilst in retrospect it might have been too much to assume major changes to their trusted formula, the contents are overly polished – and in the case of Peanut Brain, throwaway to the point of derivation. Only the introspective duet Oslo along with the Mudhoney-inspired Over and Out feel new, whilst Crashed Out Wasted gives the impression of two ideas melded into a single messy execution. Race The Night is largely not a new chapter, but just the same sentence written in a slightly different way.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 