Ash – Race the Night | Album Review

Had you forgotten about Ash? Us too.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Race the Night is a comeback album, a triumphant return, the sleeping giant arisen once more, but nope. Ash never went away – they’ve been around since 1992 and 26 years later they’re back with another full length. So is it any good? Let’s take it for a spin. That cover art seems like a pretty transparent attempt to appeal to nostalgia. Hold on. Did you feel that? Something’s not right…. We take a staggering step, like we’re using our legs for the first time. This feels…. strangely familiar. Did we…. just travel through time? Race the Night plays in the background. Oh no. Not like this.

We’ve discovered the secret that the greatest minds have been working to unravel for decades. We’ve gone back in time, to experience days gone by once more. But of all the places to end up, why oh why did it have to be sitting in front of our Freeview box in the early 2000s, parked in front of an endless array of music TV channels that are all playing what was very generously termed “Alternative Rock”.

Usual Places bleeds into Reward in Mind and you’d swear you just saw Feeder drive past in a Renault Megane. It’s all so authentically dated that there’s even a ballad – fourth track Oslo at least has the good grace to treat us to a guest appearance by Démira, but even her voice can’t save the embarrassingly clumsy refrain of “Shall we become lovers?” or disguise the bland, formulaic pop-rock recipe book that Ash are working from.

There are some honest-to-goodness attempts to inject Race the Night with a bit of the classic Ash power-pop, and the riffs are there, but it’s all just so safe that none of them really hit. The whole album slides by in a sea of beige with a desperate neon façade applied, and all of the accoutrements laid over the bare bones of the songs have come from the Top 40 playbook of years gone by. There have been glorious highs in Ash’s back catalogue, but they were a product of their time, and there’s no recapturing the magic of Burn Baby Burn, Oh Yeah or Orpheus in a musical world that’s come so far since their heyday.

There’s a flourish of strings here, a gritty synth there, but it’s a futile exercise. Other, better bands have done this before, and the really special ones have leapt from the springboard of their early popularity to push the boundaries and shoot for the stars. But Ash are rolling along the motorway behind Feeder’s Renault Megane, watching the Snow Patrol Ford Mondeo and Muse’s Citroën Picasso disappear ever further over the horizon, while they diligently continue putting out albums that peak at “fun for a listen or two”.

The album closes on Like a God (Reprise), which is a suffix you could probably add to every track on the album, and what could have been a barnstorming release of tension hits with all the power of a kid’s birthday party. It’s yet more middle of the road Top 40 rock in a time with no Top 40, and as the same riff repeats and repeats and repeats getting faster and faster and faster the seconds seem to move slower and slower. Now That’s What I Call Tedium! By the time it’s over, we’re ready to head back to 2023. Give us back our global pandemics, our cost of living crisis, our global warming. At least the music is better.