Ashes and Diamonds: Are Forever

(Cleopatra Records)

Too smart to rock out, too art school to be boring and too good to go backwards Ashes and Diamonds is the latest captivating project from Bauhaus, Tones On Tail and Love and Rockets guitar legend Daniel Ash.

The children of Ziggy were always going to be restless.

The Bowie youth have been racing into the future since the starman exploded into our lives in the early seventies, and each trajectory has been as different from the mainman and their contemporaries a possible.

Decades into a long-term career that has seen Daniel Ash shape shift his music into many different spaces has seen another glorious step into a new unknown with another enthralling album that defies category. Creating a sci-fi glam-tinged future pop, Ashes and Diamonds are a bike gang from the beyond whose music is a shimmering pop noir and dark energy crush collision of futuristic rock and an almost Kraftwerk glorious dislocation.

Constantly restless and constantly inventive, the former Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Tones on Tail guitar player has reinvented himself yet again for his new project which is perhaps named after the fifites film or perhaps after him and his diamond rhythm section of Bruce Smith (Public Image Ltd, The Pop Group) and Paul Spencer Denman (Sade, Sweetback).

After the 2024 implosion of Bauhaus and the unexpected and mind-blowing comeback of Love and Rockets for an American tour, it was perhaps too obvious for the guitar player to cut a new album with his Northampton pals in whichever combination of bands they had worked as before. Instead, he returned to his ongoing seven year on and off new project, which has ended up as another further twist on the plot.

Created during the suspension of COVID, the album exploits that dislocation and introspection of floating into the inner space of those strange years. The resulting album reflects this yet the classic hallmarks of his sound remain. In the pulsating minimalism there is still the exotic twisted guitar that creates textures instead of boring riffs, that distinctive pop noir voice and the rhythm section that provides a power in its minimalism. There is also a glam undercarriage and a twisted electronica all held together by a song cycle of great shimmering pop songs, glam decadence and an enthralling dark energy.