ALBUM REVIEW: Race The Night – Ash

The problem with successful bands from the 90s is that nostalgia haunts their every move. As time takes its toll, fans pine for the ‘good ‘ol days’, and before you know it, you’re stumbling through albums sounding like a lost puppy looking for where you fit in. For Northern Irish indie rockers ASH, Race The Night is another late-career attempt at recapturing the glory days.

Incessant pining for the past manifests itself in multiple ways throughout Race The Night. Usual Places dials back the years with those early-00s fuzzed-up indie licks, the kind of radio rock ASH stormed the charts with. It’s sonics are a soldering iron for its lyrics, which see vocalist Tim Wheeler look longingly to a world we once knew as he reminisces “We used to dance in the usual places with the beautiful faces / Now its too late, all the usual places are gone, gone” before antidoting his youth with growing old: “Maybe I’m just getting older / Yearning is in the eye of the beholder”. 

Usual Places is a rare moment for Race The Night, where music festivals fill your imagination as you raise a glass with your friends in muddy fields on summer nights. It’s not alone, the KASABIAN-grinding Like A God languishes lovingly in the psychedelic rush of mid-00s lo-fi fuzz, like a band reborn, whilst Braindead, despite its painfully self-prophesising lyrics – “Braindead, I’m calling you braindead / God bless, you dumb fuck” – is a punky earworm partying on up in your eardrums. 

If you’re dying of your thirst for more where that came from, the well’s gone dry. Race The Night sticks to its guns as ASH play it safe after five years apart. For all it’s Ric Flair-wooing, Reward In Mind ticks the indie-pop boxes, whilst the Démira-featuring Oslo is an effigy to OASIS’ Talk Tonight, with added dual harmonies from the ether. Neither song is bad, you’re just left shrugging with little else to say.

There’s a few missteps for good measure too. The title track opens the album like its couples’ therapy; shaking the rust off and rediscovering what made them fall in love in the first place. Unfortunately, that sees them try to recapture sub-par indie-rock, whilst high-jumping at a chorus that just doesn’t click. Peanut Brain’s one-minute hit-and-run doubles down on this, attempting to hijack the airwaves like Jack Names The Planets or Kung Fu once did, but without the gusto. And Double Dare brings back turntablist Dick Kurtaine in an undeniably dated attempt at recapturing the hip-hop itch they scratched together on Nu-Clear Sounds, forgetting that it was fresh in 1998, not so much 25 years later. 

Race The Night, for all its good, falls at the first hurdle of being overambitious. In attempting to revive the band of the past, ASH have forgotten about the musicians they are now, sounding more like a band looking for themselves again, when they should be settling into their skin. As Wheeler confidently proclaims on Over & Out, they’re “ripping up the rulebook, here I go”; when in actual fact, they’re recycling the one they wrote.

Rating: 6/10

Race The Night is set for release on September 15th via Fierce Panda.

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