We know the exact year (1989) when Ride rushed out of
the North Oxford Art College hoping to dose us all
with some noisy and joyous psychedelica. But can we
recall the moment they stopped trying? In the
beginning they seemed like pure freshness and
excitement: godlike like new Byrds with monastery
harmonies, thundering drums and blinding guitars. But
viewed from the mount of the Angel of History, they
were clearly a quick pick-me-up during the drowsy
hours of third watch, just before the glorious dawn of
Nevermind and Bricks are Heavy. Their
trick was hardly new, just the latest permutation of
some noise/melody innovations that the Jesus & Mary
Chain and My Bloody Valentine (not to mention Dinosaur
Jr. and Hüsker Dü) pioneered a coupla years previous.
Still, there was something unique and uplifting about
their particular sound, redolent as it was of genuine
romantic angst and squalor. Shoegazing, that's what
the Brit press dubbed it (allegedly because Ride
stared at their shoes while playing, ho ho, though the
name's dichotomy of ostentatious introspection and
stoned apathy was right on). Soon you had a movement,
with lots of fun little bands like Chapterhouse and
Lush locking into place as sleepy avatars of the
newest old sound on the block. Now that shoegazing is
spent -- gone for 10 years now -- listening to The
First Time Records' new compilation OX4_ The Best
of Ride is . . . well, it's like staring at your
dirty old pair of Chuck Taylors in the closet. Your
brain is suspended between the sublime and the mundane
as the tender memories flood in, though they're caged
by the bare facts of dumb lyrics and irritatingly
uniform monks-at-the-breakfast-table multitracked
vocals. Still, it's a long disc of great-sounding
tunes (only one dud in the bunch), and those of us who
have shed the layers of our youth by selling back our
Ride CD's could do well to catch up again. Newcomers
will be astounded by the huge booming-moaning
psychedelic sound, and old ex-fans will be bowled over
by the sweetened memories.
As with any compilation, fans will quibble with the
song selection here. Fifteen songs in 67 minutes
actually seems a bit sparse to me (yet still
exhausting when you listen straight through). Their
1990 classic Nowhere is represented by only one
song ("Vapour Trail" -- and no, "Dreams Burn Down" and
"Taste" don't really count). Also I was hoping to hear
more from their 1996 closer Tarantula (which
everyone ignored, especially me), since the sole song
here ("Black Night Crash") is pretty great. Otherwise
I have no quarrel. With Ride, the obvious stuff was
often the best stuff, and the sad trajectory of their
inspiration is well-clouded here by putting their best
stuff end-to-end.
The story of Ride's origin is pretty blank overall, a
run-of-the-mill success story. In 1989, four young
prettyboys from the North Oxford Art College clicked
as a band and started jamming and gigging. Mark
Gardener and Andy Bell were the frontmen -- their
tender voices would intertwine and coast together on
most Ride tunes, and their blinding-melodic guitar
counterpoints would define the band's sound. Bassist
Stephan Queralt was the oldest of the bunch at 21, and
though he wasn't funky, his amps sure were loud.
Finally, there's Loz Colbert, the berserk drummer
whose flying hair, wild eyes, and breakneck sticks
were the very opposite of shoegazing. He was probably
the band's most distinctive personality anyway, though
that's not much of an achievement. An A&R fuss soon
churned up, and Ride signed up with Alan McGee's
Creation Records, an obvious choice since the label
had already turned Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody
Valentine into sonic icons.
Two quick 1990 EPs (Ride and Play)
kicked off their recording career, and your heart will
get to palpitating when their distilled essence -- the
flyin'-high trilogy of "Chelsea Girl" / "Drive Blind"
/ "Like a Daydream" -- leads off this compilation.
Putting the Velvets into overdrive (both with the
title and the color-blurred sound), "Chelsea Girl" was
a breathtaking debut, a chunky glop of shiny, wet
neo-psychedelic mud. The opening line goes, "take me
for a ride away from places we have known", and later
they gripe "It's a different time now things are
moving much too fast". That sort of two-bit escapism
usually puts me off, but at least they sing bravely
from their esophagus here, rather than out of their
nose like Lou or the Reid brothers. Another pleasant
feature is the rotating minor-chord wall of feedback
that ends the song -- soon to be a trademark of their
sound. Maybe formless electron clouds shaped by
calloused fingers were dusking over every corner of
the tuneful cosmos then. Or maybe Ride were just
inspired thieves.
Remember when you used to dare yourself to coast your
bike down the hill with no hands and your eyes closed?
The best part was the panic and then the slow-motion
wipeout. Well the feedback'n'hellfire bridge in "Drive
Blind" captures that scabby-knee crash pretty
effectively: you see the bright spots, and then the
song resumes its noisy tingling calm. Still, nothing
can top "Like a Daydream", a statuesque little tune
that still sounds strong and awfully beautiful today.
It takes off with a Stooges riff and then soars all
over the place in a rarefied troposphere of frozen
choral voices and cirrus guitar filigrees. "I wish
that life could be just like a photograph", they moan
(rather tritely but beautifully), and now, at last I
get it: if a sonic picture of Ride could be frozen in
time, then this tune is it.
From this point you can hear Ride getting inflated, or
inflating itself. "Taste" and "Dreams Burn Down" (both
from the 1990 Fall EP) substitute ostentatious
technique for magic. When they sing "the taste just
slips away" among their new choral-noise gimcrackery,
you wonder whether they've resigned themselves to
their fate: contrived inspiration. Witness the
stately-stoned pace of "Dreams Burn Down", which is
fairly dull until you get to the brain-melting guitar
raveups.
But was Ride's pan about to flash? Not bloody likely.
Rather than throw out the stems with the bongwater,
they toured relentlessly, lit up some lively fertile
romances, and then dropped Nowhere, the
breakthrough album that seduced even nose-picking
American kids like me. This stuff was magic: tender
fingertips of love shifting into the clutched
shoulders and purple kisses of lust, usually in the
same song. I still love that album, even though I sold
it long ago. Tunes like "Seagull" and "In a Different
Place" still echo in me, and the memories are good.
And yeah, you betcha, "Vapour Trail" really is a sweet
song, all romance, bad poetry, inspired melody, and
condescension. It still sounds mighty charming today
(though I'd lop off that annoying cello at the end),
and it even rivals "Like a Daydream" for pure
radiance. Good choice, though I still wonder why there
aren't more good Nowhere tunes on here.
In 1992, Ride stopped the world and melted with us.
After the stopgap EP Today Forever (represented
here by "Unfamiliar"), they tried to win the shoegaze
game with the over-the-top LP Going Blank
Again. This was some serious angelic noise, but
they sure weren't angels, what with Japanese groupies
and fucked-up drug habits pursuing them all the way to
the bank. The 8-minute UK top-10 hit "Leave Them All
Behind" sets the tone. An incoming tide of "Baba
O'Reilly" keybs and blue-foaming guitars takes up the
tune's first two minutes. Then come the voices:
competitive, arrogant, and not a little stupid, these
shoegazing spiritual leaders march solemnly into their
hilltop monastery with the convincing proclamation
that they will "leave them all behind" and that
"there's nothing we can't do". True enough, since
nobody much cares about Chapterhouse or Slowdive
anymore, right? The other Going Blank Again
tracks here are the great weary-joyous indie anthem
"Twisterella" and a memorably beautiful tune called
"OX4", replete with a slowed-up stolen hook and a
spine-tingling lone synthesizer (happily, the version
included here deletes the tedious intro and outro from
the original album, so you just get the core tune, and
an excellent tune it is).
Next thing you know, NME proclaimed Ride "the
only band that matters", and the curse was on.
During the next two years, shoegazing slowly died, and
Ride were busy getting married and becoming daddies.
Duly inflicted by the dread scourge of "maturity",
they recorded a straight-psychedelic album,
Carnival of Light, which raced to the UK Top 5
in 1994 and then raced back down again. The songs
represented here are charming though. "Birdman" is
damn near a folk song, and "From Time to Time" has a
nifty little addictive hook that sounds like stoned
cupids stringing their bows. Their hit cover of the
Creation's drug-addled "How Does it Feel to Feel?" is
heavy and woozy, like having a stegasaurus as your
post-op nurse. But then there's the terminally dull "I
Don't Know Where It Comes From", this compilation's
only unequivocal dud (even despite the semi-ironic
couplet, "Turned on the radio tonight / and I was
overwhelmed with shyte"). Meanwhile their new
labelmates Oasis were overwhelming the radio with
snide anti-shyte singles like "Shaker Maker" and "Live
Forever". Now was Ride's turn to be left behind.
The band was soon overwhelmed with internal tensions
and all that predictable nonsense, and the mythically
bitchy sessions for their final album Tarantula
seemed to precede any objective critical consensus.
The album was ignored. However, the sole song here,
"Black Night Crash", is really great. Almost
Strokes-like with glammy-grunge riffs and bratty
vocals, it seemed as if Ride were gonna reinvent
themselves yet again as a snot-rock band. But alas,
they broke up instead.
There's an extra disc of four outtakes and rarities
here, though it's sure to disappoint all but the most
eager fans. "Something's Burning" and "She's So Fine"
-- both outtakes from the Carnival of Light
sessions -- are nicely forgettable Brit-hippie pop
tunes, and "Tongue Tied" (a Going Blank Again
reject) is painfully boring. But the alternate version
of Nowhere's "In A Different Place" is truly
beautiful: slowed down and tricked up with a nice
soundscape of glowing-wire guitars, they take that
puppy-lust undergrad moment of our collective lives
and milk it for all it's worth: "And we're smiling
when we're sleeping / And we're smiling when we're
waking up". It's even dreamier than the original, and
you're sure to get a bit blubbery by the end.
Ride began with some astounding attempts to create a
sonic soundtrack to falling in love or collapsing into
bliss. Part of the magic -- despite their awkward way
with words -- was a genuine striving for catharsis.
But when love became easy -- even expendable -- for
them, and drugs were an expensive and plentiful curse,
then the inspiration was lost, and their usual sonic
devices took over. And when they tried to cut out the
sonic devices in order to increase the inspiration (on
the retro-psychedelic Carnival of Light), they
apparently lost it all. It didn't help that the band
seemed to be just some pretty quartet of
interchangeable lads, without individual
personalities. They were an amorphous collective
Sound, and the sound became a genre (shoegazing), and
then the genre died, slowly. Still, OX4_ The Best
of Ride captures their moment pretty well: a blind
drive down into some sonorous and lovesick expanses of sound.
— 18 December 2002
