Free All Angels
Sixteen is a state of mind that, like that summer feeling, haunts you the rest of your life. It’s a quickening of stirrings into one overwhelming surge of sense and sensuality: cars, girls, noise, boys, surf, sand and sea breezes.
Peter Murphy, 12 Apr 2001
Sixteen is a state of mind that, like that summer feeling, haunts you the rest of your life. It’s a quickening of stirrings into one overwhelming surge of sense and sensuality: cars, girls, noise, boys, surf, sand and sea breezes. Tim Wheeler’s songs are bedevilled by that number – it’s not nostalgia so much as an aching that lives latent in the heart, apt to be triggered by certain scents and sounds; perfume, cut grass, warm wind, airs like ‘Love And Mercy’ or ‘Pale Blue Eyes’.
Free All Angels gives off such fragrances in waves. Wheeler’s captured the will o’ the wisp perfectly before, in three-piece symphonies like ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘Oh Yeah’, but here he’s written not just the poem but the whole novel, replete with car crashes, love scenes and punch-ups.
Ash’s last album, 1998’s Nu Clear Sounds, was a fuzzy but underrated record, a glam-punk pageant of mirror shades and silver strides, Lou’s wistfulness and Stooge-like depravity. Getting head in an NY shower stall, Tim was so much older then; he’s younger than that now.
Here, ‘Walking Barefoot’ serves as a thumbnail blueprint for the whole record, a visceral hit of sunshine sweetened by melody and spiked with garage-band grit, while the singles ‘Shining Light’ and ‘Burn Baby Burn’ are power-pop gems – polished, but with enough ridges to keep them interesting.
But it’s songs like ‘Candy’ and ‘Someday’ that give most hope for Ash in their old age. On the former, Tim croons “Don’t you know it’s alright to be alone” against what sounds like The Flaming Lips remixing Smile, and you can imagine some puppy-love-struck kid making a lifelong friend of this tune after hearing it on the radio under the covers, while the latter snapshots the singer in the unlikely guise of Judy Garland gone riot girl, with majestic pop-classical sensibilities.
Ash are what pundits often condescendingly but affectionately term a great little band. Mark and Rick might get painted as gruesome extras from a Kerrang! Christmas bash, but as a rhythm section they know the value of economy (check out the Ramones-paced ‘Pacific Palisades’ or ‘World Domination’), while Charlotte shreds her lines like something out of Kim Fowley’s most sordid night-sweats.
Which brings us neatly to ‘Cherry Bomb’ and ‘Submission’, grungey, wah-wah drenched ditties about cradle snatching and snatch cradling respectively. This is an intelligently paced record, with combinations of caffeinated jabs and converse-clad kung fu kicks setting up the heavyweight hooks of the stately ‘Sometimes’ or ‘There’s A Star’.
With punk-as-pop having been bled dry and bleached white by boneheads like The Offspring and Green Day, Free All Angels sees Ash marrying head, heart and hips into one handsome body of songs.
Look no further for the feel-good hit of the summer.
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