OX4: The Best of Ride
Ride were plain gauche in 1990.
Their sloppy first EPs borrowed as liberally from the Cocteau Twins’ mid-period work as that unbearable C86 racket, but in 1990, the rest of pop music was so bad that it didn’t matter. Wizened critics couldn’t bear another technically substandard batch of shambling mopes staring at their shoes, but a new crop caught on to Ride; armed with a frenetic young fan base charged by Madchester and ascendant British cool, the band (mostly teenagers themselves) sold an astounding number of records in short order. From the first two EPs, “Chelsea Girl” and especially “Like A Daydream” were standouts, but the overlong “Drive Blind” went nowhere at a snail’s pace; Creation Records’ reputation kicked it into the Top 40. Any niggling doubts regarding substance and acumen were more than answered by Fall, the band’s third EP, which landed them a deal with Sire in America, and served as preamble to the album that, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, came to define Shoegaze as a genre: 1990’s Nowhere.
Nowhere is a cherished memory for anyone that grew up tuned-in to alternative music in the pre-Nirvana ’90s. For all the talk of another British Invasion, there were only two other boy-bands playing their own instruments at the time: the Happy Mondays with Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches and the Stone Roses, who were about to drop like a dozen of them. Weak, over-hyped albums from the House of Love, Soup Dragons and yes, Jesus Jones, failed to convince us there was anything heavenly (or threatening) on the horizon, and it was all pointing to Schubert Dip from a certain angle. But in the fall of 1990, the bells rang out, and the twilight sky exploded: “Vapour Trail” ripped holes in the hearts of tens of thousands of teenagers, and still does today. Ride only recorded one other song (and it’s next in the tracklisting) that could approach the grandeur of “Vapour Trail”’s breathtaking finale, the most forlorn, alluring moment in UK guitar pop since the Smiths laid down “Well I Wonder.”
A record like Nowhere undermines a greatest hits compilation: it can’t be reduced to three or four representative tracks, because the entire album serves as the band’s true greatest hit. Ride skirt screwing with their legacy, as two of the three OX4 tracks from Nowhere — “Taste” and “Dreams Burn Down” — appeared on the 1989 Fall EP, and “Vapour Trail” was a relatively big US single, packaged with tracks from 1991’s Today Forever EP. If only they’d broken up in 1993, Ride could — like Tony Wilson — claim they never sold out. If only.
Released in March 1991, Today Forever seemed like a ploy to keep Ride’s good name in the trades, but incredibly, all four tracks rivaled the majority of Nowhere. “Unfamiliar” is included here, and more importantly, the once-rare EP was wholly appended to the 2001 reissue of Nowhere, making that impossibly grand record impossible to pass up.
With huge expectations for their sophomore full length, Ride holed up with a huge producer, Alan Moulder, recording twenty-five songs they’d use to construct Going Blank Again, a record of remarkable depth. In its unheralded variety, and its capacity to shatter the blurry, hazy caste to which critics consigned them, Going Blank Again is in many ways Ride’s finest hour.
Leading with the vast, eight-minute anthem “Leave Them All Behind,” Ride paid homage to the band whose support in no small way carried them from indie lads to mainstream pin-ups: the Cure, the biggest band in England in 1990. Aside from its breakdown, “Leave Them All Behind” is a firestorm of psychedelic guitar, relegating My Bloody Valentine’s gentle waves to the after-party. Thankfully, OX4 includes the song in its entirety, rather than the heavily-edited single mix, and on the subject of radio play, there’s no chance they’d forget “Twisterella,” the sickly sweet second single from Going Blank Again. The term “jangle” has never been more appropriately leveled; Ride melts twee and C86 into one glorious three and a half minute anthem, a heavenly pop hit.
Where Nowhere is sacrosanct, Going Blank Again can be done justice in summary. Sadly, OX4 shortchanges the album, overlooking the superb “Mouse Trap” and “Time Machine” (the 2001 reissue of Going Blank Again added four B-sides, including “Grasshopper,” one of their most elaborate efforts). The Nowhere and Going Blank Again reissues contain everything that earned Ride a small place in music history; OX4, on the other hand, houses songs from the two albums that obliterated the band’s standing with any and everyone.
When OX4 first came out in 2001 (as a three-disc box set with live and rare tracks), everyone bent over backwards to put a good face on what happened following Going Blank Again, to gloss over the obvious fact that Ride sold out. Don’t whitewash your sin with the “we got married” excuse, guys: America ruined you forever. Few bands have tanked as badly as Ride did in 1994 with the atrocious Carnival of Light, a record that wore the band’s pathetic intention to compete with Oasis on its flared sleeve. The first anyone heard of Ride in exactly two years was a sycophantic rock and roll jam about a “Blackbird flying in the sky,” and I’m hard pressed to think of a band that has fallen more painfully on its about-face than Ride does on their version of the Creation’s “How Does it Feel to Feel?”
The utterly harmless Laurel Canyon drivel “I Don’t Know Where It Comes From” capped off 1994, the year Ride’s (minor) drug use and pretend-hedonism saw their dreams burn down. They broke up the week their disastrous final LP Tarantula was released, which was a mistake, because the breakup worked to promote something they shouldn’t have recorded in the first place. “Black Night Crash,” Ride’s last single, is a sad, feigned punch from frustrated featherweights, a song that lobs haymakers all over the ring, but musters all the rancor and rage of a Weather Prophets flipside.
OX4 (Oxford) serves only to underscore Ride’s late-era failures. After two brilliant full-length albums, their creativity splintered during an exhausting American tour during which they were inexplicably convinced of the Black Crowes’ greatness. With their label Creation preparing to launch Oasis, Ride tried to enlist in the advancing Britpop ranks, to become the somber Rolling Stones to these new Beatles. In their youth and insecurity, Ride turned their backs on two records’ worth of soaring, original guitar rock that wipe the floor with anything Oasis ever released; why they’d want to remind everyone of that mistake is beyond me.
This essay was gifted to Pitchforkmedia.com on 17 Dec. 2002. It has been reclaimed by the author as a result of the site’s 2015 sale to Condé Nast.
