Ride - 4 EPs (2022) [Official Digital Download]

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Ride - 4 EPs (2022) [Official Digital Download]

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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.
© Fred Thomas /TiVo