Album synopsis: Ash's Free All Angels

So I think every once in a while I'm gonna pick an album apart, and not even albums that are my favorite but one's that just sort of intrigue me for some reason or another. Ash is an Irish band, I think, and in the early 00's came out with power-pop LP Free All Angels. I got into this album while heavily into Weezer and other such bands, so when the sped up "Today"-ish guitar riff of "Burn Baby Burn" started playing on MTV when I was in 8th grade, I was instantly hooked. And while that is straight forward Ramones style chord ramming, the rest of the album proved weirder and interesting.

I can't say I've ever seen more of an obviously Frankensteined album, with huge chunks torn from other bands and songs, only to be reassmbled into what on paper looks like a hit record in America. The "Tired of Sex" bass slamming on "Cherry Bomb", the Beach Boys "wooos" mixed with the Black Francis/Kim Deal vocal blend on "Pacific Palisades". The band keeps things extra commercial with medium tempo ballads sprinkled throughout. And yet there are fascinating anomolies, like the hip-hop/big-band stomp of "Candy". This is not an appealing sound for an 8th grade Weezer fan. That and "There's a Star" provide strange breaks from the otherwise chaste power riffs and ballady pop. Where those influences came from I can't really guess, but what was the 8th grade me's loss is the present me's gain. The bizarro content only adds to the intrigue, letting the listener in on the fact that while this is definitely an American sounding album, its was not made by Americans.

I just can't see Ash's contemporaries, bands like Weezer, Third Eye Blind and Blink-182 putting such strange musical stuff on their albums, but Free All Angels is definitely a more adventurous album because of it. I once saw a picture of Ash while touring behind this album, and as openers they were playing to empty stadiums. Tim Wheeler said the wanted the audience to be "dancing like crack smokin' hippies", but it didn't appear to be so. The closer, "World Domination", serves as the thesis and purpose for the rest of album. Why they didn't achieve it is anybody's guess.