-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
ARTIST..: Ride
ALBUM...: 4 EPs
GENRE...: Indie
STYLE...: Indie Rock, Shoegaze, Shoegaze, Dream Pop
STYLE...: Alternative Rock, Britpop, Noise Pop, Neo-Psychedelia
YEAR....: 2022
LABEL...: Wichita
COUNTRY.: United Kingdom
PLACE...: 1988, Oxford, Oxfordshire
ENCODER.: FLAC 1.3.1 -8 -V
BITRATE.: 1004kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / 2 channels
SOURCE..: CD
TRACKS..: 16
SIZE....: 502.33 MB
URL..: http://www.facebook.com/RideOX4
- TRACKLIST
* Ride EP *
1 Chelsea Girl 2:58
2 Drive Blind 4:44
3 All I Can See 3:23
4 Close My Eyes 5:26
* Play EP *
5 Like A Daydream 3:04
6 Silver 4:10
7 Furthest Sense 3:23
8 Perfect Time 3:53
* Fall EP *
9 Dreams Burn Down 6:02
10 Taste 3:16
11 Here And Now 4:23
12 Nowhere 5:23
* Today Forever EP *
13 Unfamiliar 5:02
14 Sennen 4:21
15 Beneath 4:05
16 Today 6:27
Total Playtime: 70:00
Released on November 4th 2022 and entitled '4 EPs', the first four Ride EPs
are compiled onto one record for the first time ever featuring remastered
audio (all the original audio has been reworked and refined), This is
accompanied by a 16 page booklet featuring archive photos and an essay by
Sonic Cathedral's Nathaniel Cramp.
*
Disappointingly, the package lacks credits for and information on the
mastering or audio sources. It is likely that in the period these 16 tracks
were recorded, the contemporaneous master source was digital Betamax tape - a
music industry standard. The sound here is great yet different to the
original records. It's been opened out without losing the core sonic cohesion
or any of the power. It would be interesting to know the background on this.
https://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music/music-reissues-weekly-ride-4-eps
*
Ahead of their 'Nowhere' 30th anniversary UK tour starting 20th April,
shoegaze legends Ride have announced the details of the reissues of their
early classic albums via Wichita Recordings. These will be released on the
4th November and will include the first four EPs ('Ride, 'Play', 'Fall', and
'Today Forever'), plus their seminal 1990 debut 'Nowhere', and feted 1992
album 'Going Blank Again' from their days on Creation Records.
Ride's co-frontman, guitarist and songwriter Andy Bell had the following to
say about the imminent Nowhere 30 tour and reissues:
"We were really looking forward to getting out and touring the 30th
anniversary of 'Nowhere' back in 2020. Then the pandemic hit and delayed our
plans, but here we are in 2022 and we are still buzzing about getting out on
the road, if anything, more so than before. We feel that 'Nowhere' is a debut
album worth celebrating and as well as the tour we also have decided to start
pressing new editions of the vinyl from the original Ride era, the first
batch of which not only includes 'Nowhere' but also' Going Blank Again' and
an album we've created out of the first 4 EPs. This new album has given us a
chance to create some new (but old school) Ride artwork, in conjunction with
the team at Wichita, which we are pretty pleased with. To get this Nowhere
themed period up and running, we have also created a live film of us
performing the entire album, in as close a location as we could to the site
of the original recording session at Blackwing studios."
"These are my favourite pressings ever of these albums. Creation was an
amazing record label but they didn't press on the greatest vinyl. I'd rather
have one of these new ones than an original any day."
*
In their earliest phases, Oxford band Ride were evolving at a rate almost too
fast to document. The group broke into what was still a relatively new
shoegaze scene in 1990, using high-volume guitars and chaotic, noisy
production as the jumping-off point for their songs, but set apart from their
peers by their distinctive psychedelic songwriting style, disarming jangly
pop elements, and vocal harmonies that cut through the haze to drive home the
band's ample hooks. Ride solidified all of these elements on their canonical
debut LP, Nowhere, released in October 1990, but they had found their way
with a series of three EPs released before the arrival of Nowhere, and
expanded on it with a fourth shortly after the album. In the course of a
little more than a single calendar year, the band's sound grew exponentially,
and in the process helped set the parameters for shoegaze on the whole. 4 EPs
collects the 16 songs that made up Ride's non-album output as they barreled
through the creatively unstoppable years of 1990 and 1991, presenting tracks
from Ride, Fall, Play, and Today Forever in chronological order and in one
place for the first time.
Youthful excitement crackles through upbeat songs like "Chelsea Girl" and
"Furthest Sense," with dizzy guitar swirls and twinkling tambourine grounding
the band's otherworldly shoegaze with hints of paisley underground
psychedelia. Sludgier tracks like "Drive Blind" or "Nowhere" highlight the
group's moody side, slowing things down and getting lost in the layers of
guitar and tight vocal harmonies. Having this material laid out in
long-playing album format offers a sense of just how quickly Ride were
progressing. The combination of feedback squalls and blissed-out, melancholic
melody on "Close My Eyes" from the first EP quickly sharpens into propulsive
bass lines and fast-paced but ethereal song construction on "Taste," or the
glistening dreaminess of set closer "Today," all recorded within a few months
of each other. Ride's unparalleled hot streak wasn't limited to their early
EPs, with both Nowhere and 1992 sophomore effort Going Blank Again becoming
instant shoegaze classics and setting the pace for generations of dream pop,
space rock, and other forms of liminal space indie sounds that followed. As a
counterpart to these more fleshed-out statements, 4 EPs showcases the band at
their most raw, uncharted, and wide-eyed, capturing a type of sonic euphoria
that was brand new as they created it, and still feels invigorating decades
later. - Allmusic
*
The British band Ride were planning on taking a brief break from their usual
album/tour cycle so that they could commemorate the 30th anniversary of their
noteworthy debut album Nowhere with its own special tour. But everyone's
plans got derailed in 2020, forcing Ride to put the whole idea on the back
burner. By 2022, Ride decided to let the reissue floodgates truly open by
remastering not only Nowhere but also their sophomore album Going Blank Again
and the four EPs that Ride released right around the same time. It's quite a
trove of stuff, and it all still sounds quite fresh and spry for being over
30 years old.
What the band decides to do with Carnival of Light and Tarantula in terms of
reissues, we'll have to wait and see. If you've ever wondered what the big
deal was with these guys, this is the perfect opportunity to take a one-shot
dive into their early work, a drop that represents a great deal of what the
band and psychedelia Britannia were able to accomplish in such a short time.
By 1990, noisy frequencies were finding their way into rock bands in the US
and the UK. Dinosaur Jr. had been active for about six years at this point,
demonstrating to an unsuspecting audience that there was more to racket than
just punk. Seattle bands took the template and ran in one direction while
British lads like Kevin Shields took the same template and ran in a different
direction.
If you were an aspiring shoegaze band in the early '90s UK, everyone compared
you to My Bloody Valentine, whether you liked it or not. Andy Bell, Mark
Gardener, Steve Queralt and Laurence Colbert certainly had to deal with it.
And despite the odds, during the gap between My Bloody Valentine's
widely-acclaimed debut Isn't Anything and their immortal sophomore classic
Loveless, Ride slipped out a classic of their own with Nowhere. Not only were
reviews very enthusiastic back in 1990, but plenty of ink has been spilled in
retrospection over Nowhere's brilliance. The way Ride was able to straddle
the line between hypnotically swirling noise and the mellifluous melodicism
of what would later be known as Britpop appeared to be something that people
must have been craving at the time.
If you are a newcomer to Ride's catalog, these early releases may require a
bit of explaining. Prior to Nowhere, the band released three EPs; Ride, Play
and Fall. Ride and Play were later combined into a twofer named Smile while
Fall began with a song that later turned up on the Nowhere album named
"Dreams Burn Down." The CD edition of Nowhere contained the other three songs
from Fall, placed at the end of the album.
So if you own a CD copy of Nowhere, you're already familiar with everything
that is on Fall. All three of these EPs and the one LP were released in 1990.
The following year, the band released the EP Today Forever, something meant
to tide fans over until Going Blank Again's arrival in 1992. The Wichita
collection 4 EPs combines Ride, Play, Fall and Today Forever in chronological
order, making for a 16-track collection lasting an hour and 10 minutes. So if
you are a completist, you certainly won't grumble over the inclusion of Fall.
There's quite the arc in sound quality just from Ride to Fall. The former
sounds like it was recorded by enthusiastic amateurs while the latter was
certainly album-worthy in terms of fidelity and musical quality. The full
rush of "Chelsea Girl" and its command to "destroy the frozen past" certainly
captured a snapshot of four young guys who were onto something new, and the
way "Like a Daydream" took a page out of the Madchester book demonstrated a
band willing to mix and match influences. By the time the song "Nowhere"
concludes the Fall EP, the same band is getting sucked into a kaleidoscopic
blackhole of feedback and flanger pedals.
With the glittering start of "Seagull," you could hear all of these elements
and more coming together on Nowhere. The dual-vocal attack of Bell and
Gardener spewed out impressionistic nonsense in something approaching but not
quite achieving perfect harmony. The jangly "Kaleidoscope" and the wistful
"Vapour Trail" were both singles in the US, though Nowhere is dotted with
highlights like the height-scaling "Polar Bear" and the transcendent boil of
"Decay." If you find yourself entertaining the notion that Today Forever is
an EP of Nowhere leftovers, you'll be pleased to discover that it's a
compelling release in its own right. The guitars of "Unfamiliar" both glimmer
and deliver a punch all at once, "Sennen" settles down like a soft drizzle,
"Beneath" roars outward like the best tracks on Nowhere and "Today" casts a
spell like Ride's little world was going to end the following day.
With Going Blank Again, it was clear that Ride's sound was going through
minor changes. They weren't about to give up on the Nowhere formula that
landed them on the map in the first place, but they weren't that eager to
repeat themselves either. So they did the next best thing - the kind-of
slightly changed. Ride were still mixing pop and shoegaze, but shoegaze's
dominance in the mix was starting to teeter just the slightest bit. You'd
never know it from the eight-minute opener "Leave Them All Behind" though,
the perfect bridge from LP one to LP two. It's the second single,
"Twisterella," that announces the change in weather, giving Ride a bright
sheen that could have placed them in the upper echelons in the Britpop wars.
But with bonus tracks included, Going Blank Again lasts for an hour and 13
minutes, giving Ride plenty of room to experiment. And experiment they do as
the listener will witness on the morphing guitar and fluctuating tempos of
"Cool Your Boots," the cool, nocturnal instrumental closer "Grasshopper"
which meanders for close to 11 minutes and the especially capricious "OX4,"
which can't decide if it's ambient, noise or pop.
The story of Ride is a familiar one: a young band works hard, finds success
and then splinters from within due to creative differences. Ride would call
it a day in the mid-'90s, finding the four members scattered to the winds,
only to be brought back together in 2014. The band have recorded two albums
of new material since, but the perennial love for Nowhere and all the
Creation-era material that led to its blooming just will not fade. The
rerelease of 4 EPs, Nowhere and Going Blank Again sound stellar, and while
they don't exactly offer anything new, they are the strongest testament to
what made Ride so special during a time when so many special bands were
popping out of the ground in the UK.
-=- SHGZ -=-
-=-=-==-=-=-
Shoegaze
is a genre of alternative rock that
originated in the late 80s. The genre is very
difficult to define, and it is even more difficult to evaluate music
within it. Generally, the genre is characterized by its
shimmering vocals, reverberating guitars, and
textural distortion that create
a tranquil, opaque
feeling.
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