The history of the band Ride, found in the liner notes for OX4_The Best of Ride on The First Time records, reads like something out of a VH1 documentary or authorized autobiography. Young boys from Oxford form band hoping to keep the sounds made great by bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Smiths by using lots of distortion on their guitars and staring down at their feet. Boys become one of the UK's best bands in the early '90s, releasing EPs and albums on Creation Records, the record co. behind some of Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine's best stuff. A sensation is created, the boys get huge in Japan (selling out a 4000 ticket tour in 12 minutes) and shoot to the top. And this is all before the end of 1991.
By the end of 1991 this reviewer hadn't found the beauty of shoegazer, as he was eight years old and was listening to his mom's Moody Blues tapes and his dad's Hot Tuna records. It should come as no surprise that I didn't have the blessing of growing up with Ride, a fact that seems so much more depressing now that I'm the same age the guys in the band were in 1990 when they were selling out shows and getting ready to put out what some call the greatest shoegazer album of all time, Nowhere. OX4 is the "Behind the Music" of one of the most influential independent bands of the pre-Nirvana '90s. The band's debut album Nowhere, its follow up EP Today Forever, and the sophomore release Going Blank Again show what Ride did in their heyday. Never mind that certain songs, mannerisms, and publicity shots seem to be doppelgangers of the Cocteau Twins or the Mary Chain. Never mind that their greatest music work is summed up in the first half of the 15 track best of. Never mind that they are that overlooked shoegazer band that eventually just became name dropping material for readers of Magnet or haters of all things Oasis.
Between Ride and My Bloody Valentine, shoegazer became a legitimate and downright trendy form of music. And everyone knows My Bloody Valentine while people tend to try and forget Ride thanks to the '94 release Carnival of Light, an album that was overlooked by almost everyone, and the people who noticed it saw it as a sign of a band's selling out. And while Carnival of Light and the much less bearable Tarantula make up a small fraction of OX4 and an equally smaller fraction of the memory of the band, the five tracks from those albums highlighted on this best of collection just show how far a band can fall before realizing that they've hit the bottom. It doesn't help that the group was suffering their own problems of songwriting squabbles and British rock star attitudes, they had to compete against the squabbles and attitudes of the much more annoying and therefore media-mongering label mates Oasis! It just wasn't fair.
The history of Ride sounds much better in song than it reads in review. From the feedback laden "Chelsea Girl" that opens the track to the album's climax, "Birdman," OX4 makes for a great lesson in indie history. There are few things here to complain about, aside from the inevitable denouement after "Birdman." By that time it was 1994, no one seemed to care as much about the Smiths or the Pixies or the Stooges, kids on this side of the Atlantic were getting introduced to the post-grunge pop alternative of Weezer while the kids over at the GMT meridian were busy trying to come up with some pop invasion that would inevitably crash head first into a wonder wall. Ride had seen their glory days, and while the band's music between '94 and '95 still sounds pretty good compared to some of the year's other releases the world just didn't need another British indie group trying to reinvent themselves and explore new territory. Which is why none of us Yanks listen to Ash, by the way.
B
