Ride

An immense rogue wave taking shape: that's what's depicted on the beautiful cover of "Nowhere". We have no way of knowing how big it is (the photo shows only water as far as the eye can see, no solid point of reference), but the feeling is that it's something enormous, devastating and dangerous. A disaster in fieri, so to speak, yet possessed of a sublime, crystalline beauty that leaves you disoriented.

The music contained in the record's grooves presents itself in much the same way: a torrent of sounds, images and suggestions condensed into a deafening sonic flow, yet at the same time gleaming with meticulous melodic craft. The marriage of noise and melody wasn't the exclusive property of the then-nascent shoegaze scene, but Ride made it the very reason for their existence, writing songs built on 80s jangle pop melodies, yet rocked by brutal distortion and played with a vast arsenal of effects.

From one amplifier comes a frenetic, crystalline jangle, from the other a flood of distortion; that could be the description of "Seagull", the album's opening track and one of their signature war-horses. Beneath the whirlwind of sound, rock-solid, the rhythm section carves out a sinuous groove à-la Stone Roses. And here lies the distinctive feature of "Nowhere": rhythm. The impeccable Queralt (bass) and Colbert (drums), offspring of the English rave-rock scene, don't merely cage in the guitar flourishes of Bell and Gardener, but give the tracks that danceable drive which makes it impossible to stand still even during the most reckless jams. That's how the ending of the aforementioned "Seagull" turns into an unrestrained dance, with the rhythm pushing as hard as it can and the guitars seeming to consume themselves in a bacchanal.

From here on it's an alternation of opposite sensations: first the frantic "Kaleidoscope", then the glacial arpeggios of the ballad "In A Different Place", passing through the noise breaks of "Dreams Burn Down" and the dreamlike, mournful folk of "Paralysed", which culminates in a beautiful instrumental coda. "Polar Bear", one of their high points, leads into the most absolute lysergic trance. In the first few seconds the listener loses all sense of space due to a relentless pounding on the cymbals, like a ticking clock, while a modulated guitar riff soaked in tremolo kicks in, seeming to spin in every direction; a second guitar plays a handful of notes that seem to vanish and drift out of sight. The unshakeable vocal and the visionary lyrics do the rest: "She knew she could fly like a bird/ But when she said 'please, raise the roof higher' nobody heard/ Why should it feel like a crime?". Nothing could be more explicit or effective: it's the sensation of weightlessness brought on by LSD, rendered perfectly by a song that seems to lift off the ground and float.

We were talking about rhythm, and here's "Vapour Trail", the calm after the storm, with its acid-house pattern dished out amid a whirl of phase shifter and sun-drenched strings; or the lively "Taste", which retains a paradisiacal calm (Mark Gardener's soft "aah"s) despite the sheer instrumental firepower on display.

On the other side, three tracks of total darkness. "Decay", an elegy on the brevity of life: two guitar notes, a hammering drumbeat and then the volcano of distortion in the chorus, repeated until the track fades out. "Here And Now", a four-chord loop, four immensely powerful Hammond notes, and the awareness of time passing, ruthless and inexorable. Finally the title track, a boiling magma of feedback and distortion resembling elephant trumpeting, the final stage of the descent to the bottom.

All this is "Nowhere", the album that marks the coming of age of a key band of the Nineties, one whose versatility allowed it to transcend the boundaries of the shoegaze scene, delivering a musical formula that summed up a good seven years of British pop music.

Ride the wave of great music

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19/07/2009