The Student Playlist

Showcasing the Best New Music, Curating the Classics

Tag Mark Hamilton

REVIEW: Ash – ‘Islands’ (BMG / Infectious)

Seventh album ‘Islands’ finds Ash in dynamic but uneven form, with the slower tracks and ballads edging out their regular pop-punk glories for the first time ever.

FROM WORST TO BEST: Ash Singles

by Ed Biggs In the two decades since Ash first demolished the British charts with their debut album 1977, few can claim to have been such a quintessentially ‘singles band’ as the Northern Irish three-piece. Rock music’s perpetual adolescents, stuck in a Neverland-like mindset of endless childhood summers, first romances and house parties, their singles were the essence of teenage lust, of unrequited desire, of both shyness and youthful confidence.

REVIEW: Ash – ‘Kablammo!’ (Pledge / earMUSIC)

by Ed Biggs What a tremendous pleasure it is for anybody who was a teenager at the turn of the millennium to see Ash back on the scene! It’s been five years since the conclusion of their intriguing ‘A-Z’ project, a subscription collection consisting of 26 singles released one per fortnight for a whole calendar year from 2009 to 2010. It saw the band attempt to play to their strengths –

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