Ride

Ride EP

(Creation 1990)

It’s both hard and easy to believe that it’s now 20 years since the Ride EP came out. It certainly feels like two decades ago when you look back at all the history that came tumbling out after January 1990. The ups and downs, the changes and things that have remained the same have all happened now, and this retrievable object, four tracks, released on 12-inch vinyl and smothered with an out-of-focus photograph of red roses is of a certain pivotal age. With the benefit of hindsight you could say that this record was released at the exact centre period of the shoegazing era, maybe the high point of a time when a series of bands on small British indie labels unleashed a guitar orientated sound that has since become synonymous with a pejorative all-encompassing term (1). The Ride EP or Chelsea Girl EP (as it was nicknamed) was delivered into the very nucleus of this shoegazing age and helped define the sound of the time, by marrying a lineage of effects (and it’s hard to write this without referencing where the ingredients of distortion, feedback, overdrive, chorus and delay all originate from) but for me, along with a couple of other releases of the time, the Ride EP revealed the possibilities of the guitar, beyond the tropes of classic rock (despite being indebted to it) in that it could transform into an instrument that could make, what sounded to me like revelatory, incredible and unearthly sounds (2).

 The Ride EP wasn’t the best EP of the shoegazing era, or even the best of the band’s short and ultimately disappointing career, but it captured a moment of time when anything seemed possible. Ride blazed a powerful trail for about 18 months, before the cracks that would lead to their eventual demise began to show, and the band had a potent sound and focus, before they “left it all behind” – so to speak (3). Still, for about a year and a half Ride were untouchable. “Chelsea Girl” was perhaps the best musical encapsulation of the word “noise-pop” to be found in 1990, and it’s a thrashy, flanging short shot about escaping to London, which climaxes in a crescendo of hurtling wah-wah guitar distortion and as the first Creation Records release to take a formidable position in the nether regions of the pop charts. Loud, fast, distorted, melodic and pop, five adjectives that were seldom used together to describe records destined to be played on the airwaves and in the bedrooms of a sizable population, but with the Ride EP the likelihood of these adjectives working together to describe something commercially cohesive became a very real possibility.

 “Drive Blind” with its squealing intro and refrain, bleeds all over and seeps between the clefts of the guitar layers that play off of each other, as if offering a route between noise, delay and distortion and the inevitable middle eruption of discordant abandon, ever-present in its repeated and guiding chime and reassuring in its revolving swirl. The quiet-loud dynamics or the call and response patterns in these songs are integral to their construction and half the pleasure in listening to the Ride EP has a lot to do with these patterns revealing themselves, when the other gratifying half comes from a song’s loud and overwhelming delivery. “Drive Blind” (in retrospect) is probably considered the standout track on this EP. This nihilistic tale of the sightless relinquishing of a motor vehicle, married to the cacophony of building guitar noise that mirrors a predestined catastrophe, is simple in its execution but detailed in its assemblage, and its unique squall, the musical equivalent of a conjoined flesh and metal Ballard vision (4) has probably left an indelible mark somewhere on the pop cultural landscape.

 The sight and seeing motif continues with “All I Can See” and “Close My Eyes”, the former referencing the transitory nature of lost certainties, the later simply recounting a sense exhaustion, and these are hardly profound statements, but Ride never were a band that mustered penetrating lyrical insight on the human condition, nor were they meant to be. Ride knew how to summon excitement through the use of interesting guitar effects, sustaining momentum and releasing tension through the use of sound and enveloping the listener in something different than the usual arrangements associated with two guitarists, a bass player and a drummer. “All I Can See” even contains backwards-sounding guitar among the flowing feedback and distorted chunky solos that climax into distorted wah-wah. “Close My Eyes” is more cyclical in its attack and revolves around a simple riff, but as with all the songs on this EP it’s the combination of guitar sounds, the low and high-frequencies, what is heard in the foreground and in the background at the same time and the synthesis of all it working together that is successful.

 20 years after the Ride EP was released I doubt whether it will be remembered as a defining moment in music history when the concept of its original release has since been merged into a mini-album with other EPs or the biggest problem with Ride was that they disseminated their best songs on their EPs, when albums always seem to be the sanctified testament to a band’s legacy. Maybe this will change as we move from the analogue to the digital age, because the Ride EP was a great record and a symbol of the limitless promise of a young band before they fucked it up. And now that record, symbol, testament and vestige from the past is two decades old.

 Notes

1. Ignoring the associated impact of The Cocteau Twins, Spacemen 3 and the Jesus & Mary Chain you could say the shoegazing scene was effectively bracketed between the releases of My Bloody Valentine’s You Made Me Realise EP and the Loveless album. Everything of worth from that period came out between 1988 and 1991, at least in my opinion. My Bloody Valentine pretty much birthed and killed a music scene, and rightly so, considering the significance of these releases.

2. I don’t want to go off on a tangent over a young fascination with effects pedals, but I used to think a journey into strange delayed sounds, guitar washes and feedback was the only way forward for rock music in 1990. Everything else had been done to death when I was 19, and despite not even experiencing a modicum of anything like the everything that came in the following years, conventional guitar rock felt exhausted. Everything wasn’t everything, after all, and I guess that’s what it means to be young.

3. The Leave Them All Behind single (1992) was a declaration of independence, both figuratively, from the music scene they happened to be part of, and sonically from their former selves. It all went downhill from here.

4. J. G. Ballard