Shoegaze was never going to a commercial behemoth, of
course, but it kind of got buried by grunge and Britpop pretty quickly and
helped wipe out the careers of quite a few bands who were, for whatever
guitar-centric reason, lumped into that category by critics who, as a rule,
tend to be fucknut assholes. They hate
not being able to categorize music.
Scares the crap out of them.
Hence their invention of genres that they can shoehorn widely disparate
bands into. “Post-rock”, anyone?
Ride was an exception to the Rule of Cursed Movements. They
seemed to shoot themselves in the foot and sabotage their own career with weak
records and a lack of any discernible direction. Their first couple of e.p.s were good, but
their stroke of brilliance was including the 3rd e.p., FALL, with the U.S.
version of the NOWHERE album. They
shared the same sound and the resulting 11 song record was a highpoint of early
90s guitar rock. Polar Bear shimmered, Vapor
Trail floated, Nowhere freaked
out, it was all good. Very very good.
The FOREVER TODAY e.p. got lumped in with NOWHERE on the 21st
century reissues, but it always seemed to fit better with GOING BLANK AGAIN to
me. More pop-oriented tunes, less
overwhelming guitars, but the songs on FOREVER TODAY were better written than
the GOING BLANK AGAIN stuff. I wanted to
love that album, I really did. It kicked
off great with Leave Them All Behind
and it ended even better with 0X4,
but the eight songs in between just never grabbed me. The shiny poppiness was kind of a letdown,
but the songs themselves just never felt that strong to me. Lyrics were never Ride’s strong point, so
their music always needed to be above and beyond to make up for them. Just didn’t happen here.
One of the best songs from this era, strangely enough, was
the lengthy scorched-earth instrumental Grasshopper,
relegated to an additional track on the Leave
Them All Behind single.
After this, Ride floundered.
CARNIVAL OF LIGHT was uniformly weak and uninspired. Psychedelic?
Psychedelic pop? Who the hell
knows. They seemed to be trying styles
on randomly (as opposed to evolving), just praying for a hit.
I’m really not sure why the record company even bothered
releasing the follow-up, TARANTULA. The
less said about it, the better.
All in all, a promising start, an early (and very high)
peak, and then a rapid descent into oblivion.
I tend to suspect that NOWHERE was all the originality the band had in
them. It’s tough to quit when you’re
riding high, I guess, and even harder to find a foothold once you start
falling.
Damn, that’s profound……
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