Ride - Kaleidoscopic shoegaze

Prologue

It's hard to capture as a whole the English alternative scene of the second half of the Eighties. The British “underground” music world at the time was a melting pot of wildly different, seemingly conflicting realities, which for various reasons would go on to form the humus from which the various English genres of the Nineties would soon sprout (britpop, post-rock, madchester sound, shoegaze). With the indigestion of lipstick and neon lights of synth-pop finally at an end, and the diaspora of new wave into various microscenes having run its course, the average British teenager preferred to retreat into a more melancholic, subdued world, made of introspective lyrics, Sixties nostalgia and a more sober, adolescent look, which set an ostentatious shyness against the dazzling stardom of towering Eighties icons like Duran Duran or Depeche Mode. 

It was in this context that twee pop and indie-pop were born, thanks to the work of pioneering groups from the Scottish scene (Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, and arguably also the forerunners Josef K), who anticipated the sound that indie-pop would make its own in the second half of the Eighties. A sound that rang with jingle-jangle guitar harmonies and recovered the vocals and delicate suggestions of 60s psychedelic folk (Byrds above all), updating it with the pulsing rhythmic framework of post-punk. Shortly afterwards, essential independent labels such as Sarah and Creation came into being: it was Creation in particular that steered indie-pop's melodicism toward a sharper, more psychedelic sound. These were the first steps toward the genesis of what came to be known as shoegaze, the ethereal noise-pop that dominated the alternative scene at the turn of the Eighties and Nineties, setting its suspended, paradisiacal atmospheres against the brazen hedonism of the contemporary rock-rave scene that would explode between 1988 and 1992 with the so-called madchester sound.

The final piece of the puzzle was put in place in 1988 by two bands from the Creation stable: House of Love, with their self-titled debut album, and My Bloody Valentine with the indispensable “Isn't Anything”. For the first time, that mixture of indie-pop, garage-rock and walls of guitars sounded personal and defined enough to speak of a genre in its own right: within a couple of years, bands playing shoegaze began to multiply, taking on that dreamy, detached aesthetic that made them famous and immortal.

“Like a daydream” – The origins

The band that best embodied the range of moods, sounds, harmonies and suggestions of that extraordinarily fertile musical season were Ride, four Oxford university students who in 1988 founded what would become the best-selling band of the shoegaze movement.

Their original lineup was made up of guitarists Andy Bell and Mark Gardener, fellow students who had already gained some experience in small local bands, joined by bassist Stephan Queralt and, later on, drummer Laurence Colbert. At first the four formed a typical basement band: their first rehearsal took place in the garage of Colbert's parents' house, provoking – so the story goes – complaints from the neighbors, who left a note on the front door reading “enough with that racket”; in short, scenes of everyday business as usual.

The tight-knit nature of the British scene at the time, however, soon led them to play venues around the Oxford area, until in 1989 Creation boss Alan McGee, drawn by their growing reputation, caught one of their gigs in Sheffield. A record deal followed shortly after. It sounds like the start of a career like any other, but before long those four lads would become one of the leading bands of the Nineties, each proving a standout in his own field. The interlocking guitars of Bell and Gardener pushed the marriage of jangle melody and distortion to its highest level, while Queralt's sinuous, heavy bass and - above all - Colbert's dynamic, varied drumming placed the emphasis on rhythm (something unheard of in a genre built on sonic mass and dilation), edging into the territory of that alternative British dance sound that would soon be brought into the mainstream by Primal Scream with their masterpiece "Screamadelica".

"Looking up you'll see my spirit glow" - the shoegaze phase and indie stardom

1990 is the pivotal year for Ride, who, once in the recording studio, laid down material for three EPs and an LP, released between January and September of that year. During this phase they had the chance to work with the resources of an established label, refining and personalising their sound. While the House of Love's primordial shoegaze was cradled in a gentle romanticism, the shoegaze played by early Ride was instead a full-blown, muscular and powerful space-rock, built on guitar duels - Gardener's rhythm playing, as fierce and roaring as J Mascis's, and Bell's lead work, with its ethereal tone and dizzying flourishes - a cappella vocals, and crushing doses of noise bearing down on carefully crafted pop melodies.

The debut EP Ride, though still a little green, contains four of the band's most enchanting songs. "Chelsea Girl" is one of their earliest signature tunes, a noise-pop number thrown into disarray by a turbulent chorus and a devastating wah-soaked solo in the finale. The crushingly heavy "Drive Blind" comes close to the most neurotic grunge of Nirvana, with a slow, repetitive Sabbath-like riff and an interlude of Sonic Youth-esque distortion. Side B is calmer, with the long psychedelic coda of "Close My Eyes" and the feedback-pop of "All I Can See".

Short, yes, but the debut has an immediate impact on the English indie world, and in early April a follow-up arrives, the EP Play, which shows a marked leap forward in instrumental skill, with a more refined and less bare-bones playing technique. "Like a Daydream" is an indie-pop track stretched to breaking point by a downbeat riff, over which Bell's lead guitar embroiders a wonderful, soaring solo. "Silver" is its exact opposite, a torrent of ramshackle guitar distortion, the negation of all clarity, a surrender to a kind of bad trip worthy of the 13th Floor Elevators' "Psychedelic Sounds...", but played with twice the violence; it's remarkable how such a clean, calm voice can sit alongside such an instrumental inferno.

The remaining two tracks stay at a more than solid level, built around the same combination of guitar power and clearly defined melodies with heavenly vocals.

The compilation Smile would later gather both EPs onto a single release.

By 1990 Ride were seen as the most violent of the shoegazers, since what they actually played was a strongly pop-inflected space-rock. Even so, they connected instantly with the alternative audience, thanks to melodies that were easy to remember and instantly recognisable.

But the EP Fall and the album Nowhere, released shortly after, again on Creation (later combined on the CD edition of the latter), would usher in a new chapter, confirming the quartet's newfound artistic maturity. Gone was the space-rock violence and guitar barrages, replaced by a more measured style, though still every bit as powerful and incisive. The two guitars are increasingly drenched in effects, making the atmosphere now more relaxed and dreamlike, now more agitated and claustrophobic, spilling into sonic violence in a way that's less chaotic and more deliberate, with surgical care taken in balancing noise and melody. The more professional production and the obsessive attention to sound do the rest: Nowhere is no longer chaos and frantic energy, but a lucid, monumental psychedelic work built entirely on contrasts - distortion and melody, violence and atmosphere, tension and release, light and shadow - a dual nature mirrored in the beautiful rogue wave pictured on the cover (is it enchanting beauty or destructive force?).

The tracks on the record balance all of this perfectly: "Kaleidoscope" is an accelerated pop song battered by torrential distortion, "Polar Bear" is its opposite, a static, circular piece, its solemn vocal floating over a vibrating bed of tremolo-soaked guitar. Like two sides of the same coin, "Seagull" and "Decay" are, respectively, a shoegaze transfiguration and a descent into the abyss - the former as epic and devastating as the latter is oppressive and dark. "A Different Place" shifts register entirely, a tender indie-pop ballad steeped in thick melancholy and graced by Gardener's most intense vocal performance, but the mood turns turbulent again with "Dreams Burn Down", its heavy, measured drumming and sudden noise outbursts shattering the heavenly calm.

The quality never dips in the album's final stretch, with the wonderful "Vapour Trail", almost danceable yet still ethereal and celestial; the strings that soar in the closing moments, fading away like a vapour trail in the sky, seal a perfect tracklist (in its original version). Also unmissable are the single "Taste", sunnier and more pop-facing, and the swirling mass of drones and feedback of the title track, as suffocating as a slow descent to the ocean floor. But the absolute masterpiece is the monumental "Here And Now", with its seething mass of guitars, so violent yet so beautiful and perfect; an epic, thunderous track that nonetheless seems to slip into the void, capturing that sense of abandonment and fleetingness running through the whole album.

Ride entered 1991 backed by unanimous critical acclaim and considerable popular support, to the point of being hailed as the brightest hope of British rock. It would be thanks to their sales - and those of Primal Scream - that Creation survived the financial abyss caused by the production costs of My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" (a staggering £250,000!), at least until 1994, when the label would launch one of the most successful bands of the last twenty years, Oasis. It's curious that, ten years on, in the internet era, Kevin Shields's band's fame has far outstripped that of Ride, when fifteen years ago the commercial and critical success of Gardener and co. showed the relationship was reversed.

The 1991 EP Today Forever follows the majestic sound of the previous LP, but dresses it in a softer, more pop-leaning guise, laced with a thick blanket of effects and ever more lush guitar interplay. The record doesn't quite match the heights of their earlier releases, but it's an essential step in understanding Ride's artistic journey. A song like "Unfamiliar", in any case, is worth a whole career on its own, not to mention the catatonic pop symphony "Today", built on droning guitars and a cappella vocals.

1992's Going Blank Again breathes new life into Ride's music, surprising those who at the time expected a simple follow-up to their success of two years earlier: with this album Ride delivered the perfect synthesis of ten years of English alternative sound, reshaping shoegaze, twee, power-pop and the madchester sound into their now unmistakable style. The production, handled by Alan Moulder, pulls off the trick of giving order and brilliance to their distortion, never so saturated and never so crystal-clear at the same time.

Going Blank Again carries the impulsive, passionate shoegaze of early Ride towards a more rational, abstract rock, where the songs focus on the perfection of sonic architecture and texture. Despite the change of course, the album sells well, reaching number five on the UK chart, while the single "Leave Them All Behind" quickly becomes an indie hit, with its contrasts between atmospheric pauses and walls of bass and drums, between a cappella vocals and bursts of distortion. "Not Fazed" and "Mouse Trap", on the other hand, are far less conventional tracks, with the vocals pushed into the background and often chanted; the former especially is a masterclass in interwoven melodic lines, with one guitar hammering out a thick, repetitive wall of sound while two lead guitars embroider hypnotic melodies above it.

Noise and melody enrich the aching “Cool Your Boots”, with Gardener's vocals growing ever more solemn, and “Time Of Her Time”, a superb noise-pop episode; of a very different stripe is “Chrome Waves” (written by Andy Bell), which leans into a liquid, dreamlike psychedelia, swaying over a placid keyboard line.

More atypical in style are “Time Machine” and “OX4”: the former built on a spare, geometric melody that repeats over an unusually dark and heavy bassline, the latter a dream-pop track drenched in keyboards, almost a more aggressive take on Slowdive. Confirming the record's eclecticism are the two indie-pop masterpieces “Twisterella” and “Making Judy Smile”, two gleaming, sun-drenched pop gems wrapped in gentle psychedelia and studded with finely woven solos amid towering chords.

With its stellar sound, Going Blank Again stands as a unique case within shoegaze, helped along by a tracklist full of memorable songs; its melodies and atmospheres feel like a snapshot of the British generation straddling the 80s and 90s, torn between dreamy romanticism and the lure of synthetic-drug-induced psychedelic experience. Unfortunately, in the wake of the album's success the band grew increasingly fractured, and the two main songwriters (Bell and Gardener) ended up fighting for leadership.

“Leave them all behind”: beyond the shoegaze experience

The 1993-1994 period is the stage for a genuine revolution in British pop, with the explosion of britpop, spearheaded by pioneering bands like Suede and Blur, a wave that would soon sweep across the entire English scene. The dazzling melodies and the bright, powerful sound of this new wave of bands exude Britishness from every note, digging up and remixing the English pop tradition in every possible permutation; this new sound ends up overwhelming the dreamy intimacy of indie-pop, while true stars like Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn seize the crown from the decadent madchester scene, which burns out as quickly as it reached its peak.

While the madchester sound gets swept away by the britpop shockwave, shoegaze absorbs the blow but changes shape radically: many new acts offer a rockier take on the genre (like Adorable on the underrated “Against Perfection”), while others aim to reconcile the two genres by hybridizing them (chief among them Boo Radleys); in this landscape Ride manage to seize the moment reasonably well, but squander the opportunity due to internal friction within the band.

Carnival Of Light (1994) is split exactly down the middle, with side A written by Gardener and side B by Bell, by now unable to cooperate and worlds apart in style (the former more folk and psychedelic, the latter more britpop and retro). Despite the rift within the band, Ride realize that the shoegaze movement is losing its innovative drive and try to reconcile their sound with that of the newborn britpop (telling is the album cover, which portrays the group with a 90s look light years away from the indie-pop iconography of their early days). This choice is indicative of the trend within Creation around the mid-90s: Carnival Of Light, in fact, comes out just twenty days before the release of Oasis's debut, one of the biggest sellers of the britpop epic.

Straying ever further from his tried-and-tested formulas, Gardener ventures into a dark electric raga-folk complete with psychedelic organ (“Moonlight Medicine”), gives in to Byrds-like temptations (“1000 Miles”) or blues (“From Time to Time”), only to then launch into a psychedelic orgy (“Natural Grace”, which succeeds where Stone Roses would fail that same year with the mediocre “Second Coming”).

On the other side of the divide, Bell answers with the electric outbursts of “Birdman” and with “Crown Of Creation”, his finest song, a sweet ballad woven with acoustic guitars, an organ and a faintly lysergic chorus. Unfortunately the rest of side B doesn't shine as brightly as the first half, but amid its sixties echoes it still delivers great moments (“Magical Spring” and the delicate “I Don’t Know Where It Comes From”, another exceptional ballad).

All things considered, Carnival Of Light is a fragmentary album by its very nature, but no less substantial for it; it's the anti-commercial, pivotal record one would have expected from Ride once they emerged head held high from the shoegaze experience. As was predictable, though, poor sales failed to match the solid critical success; Ride's popularity was already on the wane.

“Our growth seems certain to decay” – The decline and the breakup

At this point it's inevitable that Ride's artistic arc enters its downward phase, with a band now essentially in ruins and at the mercy of Andy Bell's delusions of grandeur, evidently more aggressive but less brilliant than his counterpart Gardener, who by now is relegated to mere guitarist rather than songwriter, to the point that on the following Tarantula he would pen just one track. The album would see the light of day in 1996, right after the band's split, and would receive scathing reviews from critics and fans alike, unhappy with Bell's new direction.

With hindsight, one can calmly say that the stoning the record received was excessive and most likely driven by Ride's waning image, as by the end of their career they had gone from setting trends to merely chasing them (now it was them following in Oasis's footsteps). Tarantula is not a terrible record, just an unremarkable, workmanlike effort that pays the price for being shamelessly classicist rather than fresh, and for having set aside the incredible tension that defined tracks like “Decay” and “Like A Daydream” in favor of a sunny, pleasant mood. In terms of quality, the album hovers around decent levels, with few interesting moments but also few real missteps.

The flattened electric guitars of “Black Nite Crash” open the record, revealing the new path charted by Bell, a direct, powerful, no-frills guitar rock, light years away from any shoegaze leftovers, and closer to the electric, muscular britpop of Oasis and Kula Shaker. Aside from the opening track, it's hard to single out even one song that stands out, for better or worse, from the surrounding mediocrity, so the album slips by without leaving any great moments, exposing its obvious compositional flaws, the result of a slapdash execution. At this point, the breakup is inevitable and, frankly, overdue.

On the artistic front, the post-Ride years are a downward spiral for both contenders: Andy Bell founds Hurricane #1, a britpop band in the wake of Oasis, with two largely dispensable, if not outright poor, albums to their name; it's no coincidence that the former Ride man has been a permanent member of the Gallagher brothers' band since 1999.

Far worse was the fate of Mark Gardener, who launched into a solo career marked by the saccharine pop of "Send Away The Ghosts", blatantly crowd-pleasing and sung in a boyband-style voice, a far cry from the ethereal, almost sacred vocals of early Ride.

Only Colbert came out of it well, having played drums in various groups, including Supergrass.

Once the post-breakup tension had subsided, the band members occasionally reunited for a handful of shows, including a thirty-minute feedback performance released on the limited-edition EP Coming Up For Air, as well as acoustic gigs involving Gardener and Bell, proof that the tension between them had eased over the years. Bell himself, while ruling out a permanent reunion, has said he doesn't exclude the possibility of future collaborations with his old bandmates.

Ride's second life

Hopes for a reunion became tangible in 2017 with the release of Weather Diaries, which only partly reopens the book of memories, since Ride were keen to set themselves apart from the chorus of nostalgia acts, searching for solutions that were (for them) new, even if the results never match their best albums. The opening tracks "Lanney Point" and "Charm Assault" (with a brief psych insert toward the end) bring back guitars intertwining the way they used to, but the overall framework struggles to take off, and the record soon settles into anonymous territory, lacking the charisma a band of this stature should display. The electro flourishes on the following "All I Want", the dreamy approach (never reaching the emotional heights of certain Beach House moments) on "Home Is A Feeling", the pop polish of the title track (which toward the end indulges in a few "shoegazer" detours), the sturdy synthetic layers on the first half of "Rocket Silver Symphony" (which then veers off into kraut territory) are some of the solutions devised by today's Ride, without ever managing to make us jump out of our seats.

In the second half of the record the band steps out of its comfort zone to dare a little more and broaden its horizons. Enter the garage energy of "Lateral Alice", the Byrds/Wire imprint of "Cali" (with a lovely guitar close), and the evocative short instrumental "Integration Tape", before seeking calm in the placid oases of closing tracks "Impermanence" and "White Sands". All things considered, there's no compelling reason to choose "Weather Diaries" over any of the band's pre-breakup work; it's also true that the looming shadow of "Nowhere" is deliberately kept at a distance, in an attempt to shake off the past (unlike what My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive did) and try to be something different today. There are some truly beautiful moments on "Weather Diaries", but too few to count as a best-of what Ride have managed to write over the last twenty-one years.

The intentions of the renewed Ride emerge even more clearly the following year with the EP Tomorrow's Shore. Within seconds, "Pulsar" unveils a synth line that recalls MGMT and - why not - M83. Sounds closer to the band's past only arrive toward the end of the track, which paints hyperspace with laser guitars. One of their best post-reunion songs. "Keep It Surreal", meanwhile, updates the jangle of "Twisterella" for the 2010s, featuring clear, grounded vocal parts in a way never heard before in Bell and Gardener's catalogue. Equally evocative is the combination of acoustic and cosmic elements at play in the enveloping, Pink Floyd-esque suite "Cold Water People". Closing the EP, "Catch You Dreaming" is both the longest and the most pop song of the bunch, moving in a sinuous, enchanting way to the groove of a buttery 80s bassline, landing somewhere close to latter-day Tame Impala.

Not always fully focused - indeed, the closing track's six-plus minutes grow a bit tiresome - Tomorrow's Shore shows even more forcefully than the full-length that preceded it Ride's determination to reinvent themselves. The fact that these songs, despite having been recorded alongside those on "Weather Diaries", didn't find a place on it - with the band instead opting for tracks closer to its traditional shoegaze sound - suggests that, the previous year, the four of them still didn't feel ready to completely upend the expectations of their earliest devotees.

Ride nonetheless remain among the great protagonists of the shoegaze movement, chameleonic enough to reinvent themselves once the genre's forward momentum had run its course. Theirs was a highly personal take on the scene's stylistic tropes, built on a dynamism, power and speed unusual within the movement. This, along with other traits (the spectacular use of two voices and two guitars, the diversity of their records, the kaleidoscopic atmospheres, the inventive rhythms...), made them one of the leading musical forces of the Nineties.

It's hard not to be struck, in 2019, by the sheer number of ideas and influences at play on This Is Not A Safe Place, which make it a certainly fascinating and multifaceted record, but also an uneven and episodic one, showing Ride not always at ease with the material at hand.

The clogged electronics of "R.I.D.E.", which only hints at shoegaze through its plaintive vocal parts, effectively kicks off a whirlwind whose internal logic is hard, if not impossible, to pin down. It's followed by "Future Love", a nod to the jingle-jangle past of "Twisterella", and "Repetition", a stretched-out neo-psych take on late-90s Primal Scream cyber-punk. The tense "Kill Switch" is a shoegaze gut-punch as mean as it is inspired; equally thunderous are the fuzz blasts that tear through "Fifteen Minutes", yet another rhythmic marvel courtesy of Queralt and Loz.

Ride's more atmospheric side finds an outlet instead in the folk ballad "Dial Up", liquid and placid, lightly flecked with vintage electronic interference reminiscent of old ISDN connections; while the introduction of the lengthy "In This Room" even recalls certain mechanisms of Notwist. "Clouds Of Saint Marie" and "Eternal Recurrence" form a substantial central block faithful to the spirit of "Weather Diaries". The former is a very successful song, thanks above all to a decidedly catchy chorus, while the latter is a limp attempt at stadium rock, a problem that also afflicts "Jump Jet". The lovely "End Game", which culminates in a piercing tremolo-guitar finale, is finally a satisfying treat for diehard fans of the band's shoegaze phase.

Given the muscular approach of the tour supporting "This Is Not A Safe Place", the last thing we expected was to run into a heavily sweetened version of those songs. And yet Andy Bell, Mark Gardener and company opted for a modern-classical reinterpretation of the entire record, handing the keys to this reimagining to the duo Petr Aleksander, made up of Tom Hobden of Noah & The Whale and Eliot James of Two Door Cinema Club. The album, titled Clouds In The Mirror, was released in early May 2020, just as lockdown restrictions eased. "This Is Not A Safe Place" was dissected and rebuilt from scratch, entirely revised, with vocal parts scaled back, not only trimming away the shoegaze guitars of "Future Love" and replacing them with the placidity of piano and strings, but also wiping out any rock momentum whatsoever. An exercise that gently takes Ride by the hand and leads them into a neoclassical format entirely new for them. With any guitar-driven instinct banished, the melodic root of their songwriting is, unsurprisingly, thrown into sharp relief.

Reducing the wall of sound that characterised "Kill Switch" and the electro onslaught of "R.I.D.E." to a bare, melodramatic minimalism is proof of no small amount of courage. Everything becomes much more "controlled", and the new orchestrations strip away not only the dreamy electricity of "Eternal Recurrence" but also the more acoustic feel of "Dial Up" and "Shadows Behind The Sun", drawing a hard line even through the evocative coda of the closing "In This Room". There's nothing that doesn't work in the ideas brought out by Petr Aleksander's involvement, but the new versions never manage to surpass the originals, resulting in an album that risks feeling superfluous to Ride fans and forgettable to modern-classical enthusiasts, who can also enjoy an even sparser, fully instrumental edition. With hindsight, it might have been more effective (and more of a challenge for all involved) to apply this treatment to the English band's back catalogue, reworking their 90s cult hits. Then again, that might just be the next project in the works...

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Appendix: Three masterpiece Ride songs, in detail

"Seagull" (6:09), from "Nowhere"

What do "I Am the Resurrection" by the Stone Roses, "Don't Fight It, Feel It" by Primal Scream, "Push The Tempo" by Fatboy Slim, "Setting Sun" by the Chemical Brothers – four tracks that made the history of English alternative dance – have in common with "Seagull", by Ride? A couple of shared labels and clubs between their respective authors, some crossover of personnel, and one trick: reinterpreting the amen break* through a 60s rock lens, grafting onto it a powerful, circular bassline, and seasoning the whole thing with a psychedelic, jamming sonic torrent.

It may come as a surprise, but at the heart of "Seagull" lies a dance-music architecture. The song's atmosphere, however, is a far cry from the gaudy trance of the tracks mentioned above: swirling, adrenaline-fuelled, even epic in the way it marries ecstasy and claustrophobia. Where does it diverge from the acid house/madchester/big beat flow, and where exactly do Ride veer off the sunny, freewheeling main road to get mired in this harrowing dead end?

First of all, the guitars. A wall of jingle-jangle and distortion: on one side a cascade of silvery, piercingly high notes, arpeggiated à la Byrds; on the other a whirlpool of wah-wah and noise. Neither element ever prevails over the other – it's the eternal conflict between the celestial sound of one and the searing lines of the other that generates the tension fuelling the track, along with the sense of impassability that comes with it. As the second minute draws to a close, there are three guitars at play: one, the most transfigured, takes on the sound of a bagpipe and becomes a pentatonic river, pointing straight back to centuries of British history, clan warfare and murder ballads. There it is, the justification for that epic element pervading the track: beneath the noise-rock shell, beneath the dance foundations, "Seagull" conceals a folk subconscious. The melody follows a hexatonic scale typical of many English traditionals, and the doubled vocals turn the music choral, the expression of a collective feeling.

In this new context, the repetitive rhythmic base becomes less a liberating trance than a trap, an obsessive mechanism from which every other element seems to want to break free. Yet both the distorted guitar flights and the droning vocal lines can't help but spin in place and inevitably return to their starting point: that frenzied rhythm, jagged but never truly broken, and that C minor which is the harmonic fulcrum, the eye of the storm. Ecstasy, taking flight, is possible only in thought, in the lyrics:

But we know there's no limit to thought

We know there's no limits.

Now it's your turn to see me rise,

You burned your wings, now watch me fly,

Above your head.

Looking down I see you far below,

Looking up you see my spirit glow

* The most common sample in hip-hop, later chopped up and reassembled in every possible way by drum'n'bass. It takes its name from "Amen Brother", a funky-soul instrumental rework of a gospel tune by The Winstons, who recorded it in 1969 as the B-side of the single "Color Him Father", with no idea that the drum break at 1:31 would, decades later, achieve a fortune far greater than that of the A-side.

"Decay" (3:36), from "Nowhere"

"Decay" is a crescendo, and the more it grows the more it drags you into its spiral of annihilation. "Our growth seems certain to decay": as the scaffolding builds, layer upon layer, the sense of decadence, desolation and disillusionment becomes ever more oppressive. At first, it's just the drums: sharp hits, but deep and dense with reverb; they're the martial soul of the track, its gloomy, relentless pulse. The guitar comes in right away: two notes, repeated ad libitum, which are actually a single note refracted across two octaves; the hi-hat answers off the beat, stirring the stasis with disco-like accents. Then the bass, the song's subliminal pillar: E-B-C-A, a fall, an utterly futile attempt to lift its head by clinging to the root note, and then the final plunge – there it is, the motion toward the centre of the spiral, there it is, the decadence that bears down on every ounce of resistance. A roll of cymbals fades out and clears the ground for the vocal, a monotone dirge that spells out the inevitable:

We have short time to stay,

Our night is slipping far away

There's no time, we have to hurry. The irrational fury is a new guitar, rough and distorted: it paws the ground, it cuts through, but it's blinded by instinct and can't land its blows; soon it gets tangled in an unchanging, pervasive noise – “Now this feeling's so alive/ But, as you or anything, we die” (behind the lead vocal, an echo in counterpoint like a ghost). The final act is the loss of reason: the drums scatter bursts of offbeat hits, trying every way to escape the spell that wants everything trapped at the center of the vortex; but everything else is already petrified, and the voice dreamily repeats the last words of the curse: “We die, we die, we die…”.

“Twisterella” (3:42), from “Going Blank Again”

Of “Twisterella” we could throw everything away and keep only the riff. Two guitars, a chord progression with nothing special about it, and that sound, that jingle-jangle amalgam in which it's impossible to tell who's doing what. The internet is littered with attempts to reproduce it, transcribe it, put its chemistry down in black and white: all failed, miserably failed. “Twisterella” could end at second number eight, right after the first appearance of its miraculous, irreducible riff. Even just like that, it would be history. A curl of bass and off we go, headlong into the crystalline clatter of Gardener & Bell. There's no time to stop and think about how fundamental and masterful those three bass notes are, that false start which suggests anything but such an explosion of harmonics about to follow. And yet the sequence is perfect: B-C#-E-C# and then B again, but multiplied a hundredfold in the barre chords of E major and propelled by the dance-floor ecstasy of the drums. A loop that lasts barely a second, starting under the radar and, as if it were nothing, catapulting straight into the middle of the dancefloor. That one second of bass is love at first sight, the shove that won't let you stand on the sidelines: without it, “Twisterella” and its riff would have had to start already at full charge; instead, with this 0-to-100-km/h in under a second, the rush hits like a shot of adrenaline.

Or a tab of ecstasy. Because fortunately “Twisterella” doesn't end at the eighth second, and shortly after it kicks into:

Any minute you will feel the chemistry

Vibrations in the brain can’t ever be explained

Slip away and out of sigh, feel the magnet of a night

The circus lights you see is where you have to be

What are we talking about? Love at first sight, and the whirlwind of emotions that comes with it (just as the song's riff has its own “chemistry,” but an elusive one). Or else the explosion of colour and total euphoria that follows taking MDMA. The whole lyric plays on this ambiguity, and every musical detail seems to go along with it.

The vocal melody is dreamy and carefree, but it too is subtly ambiguous. While the arrangement's key is triumphantly (E) major, the vocal line draws on a different tonal centre (G#, which suggests a minor mode), from which perspective the very same notes take on a more pensive character: the verse is thus tinged with a veiled melancholy, the kind of premeditated nostalgia associated with moments that, as we know, will never come back.

Bass, drums and lead guitar keep swaying continuously between two steps, the downbeat that opens the riff and the upbeat that closes it. It's precisely in this latter stretch that the sparks concentrate: pirouettes on the hi-hat, slides, syncopations, and then the entrance of that same magical three-note bass line that, with every loop, “recharges” the whirl.

Until we reach the chorus:

If I've seen it all before

Why’s this bus taking me back again

If I don't need anymore

Why’s this bus taking me back again

Here the sense of estrangement takes over: drums and bass pound out a metronomic tunz-tunz, the guitars, more blended than ever, impose a single, disorienting wall of sound, joined by an obsessive jingling of cymbals and tambourine. An “aah” in counterpoint, meanwhile, gives the voice something epic, choral, as if the feeling belonged not to one person alone, but to everyone. Just a few seconds, though, because the cascading rhythm on “back again” immediately breaks the spell, pulling us back into the thick of the dancing.

Feel the weight of letting go

Feel more lightness than you've ever known

You can't see when light's so strong

You can't see when light is gone

The abandonment of weight, the shiver, the ascension, are all there in the Hammond flare-ups that follow the final verse. A vortex of light, the opposite of the torpid, blind one in "Decay". At the close, the vocal is refracted into a hazy, barely perceptible psychedelic magma. By now the mind is well beyond the physical world, and every voice is just a distant echo…

Andy Bell goes solo

Andy Bell made his long-awaited solo debut official in 2020 with The View From Halfway Down.

After throwing everyone off the scent by releasing two singles that wouldn't even end up on the album, "Plastic Bag" and "The Commune" - two bare, understated sketches of psychedelic ambient-pop, adorned with little more than an autumnal string line and a few splashes of glitchy electronics - the time finally came for the first real preview, "Love Comes In Waves": a carpet of spacey keyboards, a wound-up twee guitar and a cocky britpop vocal. A contagious, radio-friendly psych-pop ecstasy that also made clear whose pen was behind the exuberant Ride of the "Tomorrow's Shore" EP.

Not always this dazzling - except perhaps in the bouncy "Skywalker" - the album's tones consistently lean toward Sixties psychedelic pop and everything that sprang from it. Driven by a great bassline and a hypnotic guitar arpeggio, for instance, the delightful "Cherry Cola" shakes together the solo gems of Syd Barrett and an attitude worthy of 90s Beck; while the brief "Ghost Tones" lets an acoustic guitar moan in search of peace over a bed of solemn synths. "Aubrey Drylands Gladwell", meanwhile, unleashes supersonic guitars that leave trails across the sky like the spaceship of Hawkwind.

In 2022 came Flicker, a new solo album by Andy Bell. The signals sent out by the blurry cover image - which reworks a shot dating all the way back to 1990, taken from the inner sleeve of "Nowhere" - come together with a sprawling body of work made up of eighteen tracks born from sketches the Welsh artist kept and let mature, in some cases, since his earliest days with Ride, reaching, in later eras, episodes stemming from his parallel collaborations and solo experiences as well. The lockdown period proved useful precisely for dusting off and finally bringing these unfinished projects into focus, recording them at the studio of friend and colleague Gem Archer, with whom he had already worked directly back when he joined Oasis (1999-2009) and later Beady Eye (2009-2014). Andy Bell worked mainly from sketches of instrumental tracks, for which he wrote brand-new lyrics, in a kind of cognitive dissonance that symbolically led him to engage in a form of artistic exchange with his twenty-years-younger self. The result is rewarding. The songs give off a vigorous nineties energy shaped by the invigorating maturity of a man and artist who has by now crossed the threshold of fifty. The same dose of wisdom already present on his first solo work, "The View From Halfway Down", from 2020, and also, why not, in his parallel electronic path launched under the moniker Glok. The 76 minutes over which this sturdy album stretches go by quickly, gathering along the way a wealth of facets that Bell's ever-harmonious voice and his many layers of guitar carry from the ever-present britpop ("World of Echo", "Love is the Frequency"), to fascinating psychedelic readings ("Riverside", "Jenny Holzer B. Goode", "Sidewinder"), on to the more contemplative side of pop ("We All Fall Down").

The inclusion of entire instrumental episodes such as the Elizabethan "Gyre And Gimble", a track that recalls the airy, indie sheen of La's, and "When The Lights Go Down", with its dreamy saxophone and introspective guitar lines that bring to mind Nick Drake's "Bryter Layter", round out a picture that also hints at blends of shoegaze and ethereal melodies ("It Gets Easier", "The Looking Glass" and "The Sky Without You"), the latter crafted through backmasking, in the best British tradition that started with the Beatles, or thereabouts, running all the way to the Stone Roses of "Don't Stop".

Among the standout tracks on the record are certainly "No Getting Out Alive", a pseudo-blues that shifts its shape into Spaceman 3 territory, and the melancholic "Something Like Love", which at first glance might look like a close cousin of "Vapour Trail" (from Ride's seminal debut), were it not for the orchestral trajectory that builds its dreamlike backbone.And it's precisely on this track that Andy Bell delivers the evocative line ⟦Q1⟧, a brief but utterly explanatory phrase that helps pin down the best way to describe this delightful, eclectic work by a singer-songwriter too rarely (and unfairly) ranked among the best of his era.

In 2024 Ride reunited for a new album, Interplay, which for the most part veers into a kind of electropop heavily influenced by new wave. Tracks like "Peace Sign", "Last Frontier" and "Monaco" carry varying doses of Interpol, Editors and New Order, without ever quite reaching the level of the references they draw on. In its middle stretch the album loses its vitality, settling into a run of forgettable tracks such as "Stay Free", "Last Night I Went Somewhere To Dream" and "Sunrise Chaser". The winning moments come instead with the surging instrumental coda of "Light In A Quiet Room", the energetic opening of "Midnight Rider" and a "Portland Rocks" that earns the title of best song on the record, on par with the finest Ride. For the rest, plenty of craft, but results that always feel a touch faded, further diluted in compositions that too easily run past the five-minute mark without ever making that length feel necessary.

Of all the bands that animated the shoegaze scene at the dawn of the Nineties, Ride were the ones who best embodied the missing link with the britpop movement that followed: it was no coincidence that one of the English band's two singer-guitarists, Andy Bell, went on to play with Oasis. Even since they got back on the road for good in 2017, Ride's ties to the musicians who "loved staring at their shoes" have remained loose: something of an own goal, given the hype currently surrounding the nu-gaze scene, the source of sounds that TikTok is helping celebrate as the perfect soundtrack to the disorientation of twenty- and thirty-somethings. A comeback less illuminating than that of other sacred monsters who returned with far sharper output, especially that of Slowdive, who have even been hailed more in their second life than in their first.

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Ride the wave of great music

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