Ian Ash by Ian Ash
It's been years since Milwaukeean Ian Ash has graced a CD with either of the bands he appeared with in the past, The Last Bees and Ian & The Dream. The time off has done him good—like a scientist cloistered in his laboratory making new discoveries. Ash has become a master of a cheeky, wide-ranging pop pastiche of a breadth his past efforts, at best, only intimated.
He opens the whole 13-song shebang with an ode to carnality set to the light touch of acoustically strummed reggae. Elsewhere, he splits the middle between grunge and electro pop in a way both Nirvana and Berlin could have gotten behind. Ash’s aspirations toward baroque Beatles-informed songcraft remain intact from his previous projects, but here he has more immediate hooks and feistier wordplay. As for his lyrics, Ash also seems to have learned from another titanic act in English pop, George Michael, to insert incongruous words and phrases into a lyric and make them sound natural as breathing. How else to account for saying his girlfriend's mom is neutral as Switzerland? If all that weren’t enough, Ash belies some They Might Be Giants influence in waxing rhapsodic over a science teacher.
Quirky though he is throughout his debut as a solo artist, Ash's idiosyncrasies are wrapped in indelible hooks and production just slick enough for the Top 40 radio rotation.
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