Ride

Ride – 4 EPs (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:10:03 minutes | 868 MB | Genre: Alternative, Indie
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Wichita Recordings

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
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Ride – Interplay (2024) [24Bit-48kHz] FLAC [PMEDIA] ⭐️
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 00:58:46 minutes | 737 MB | Genre: Pop, Rock, Alternatif et Indé
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover

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Ride – Interplay (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 58:46 minutes | 738 MB | Genre: Alternative Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Wichita Recordings

Everything feels like it has been leading to Interplay, Ride’s forthcoming seventh album, the third since their 2015 reunion. It’s the sound of the group connecting all the dots, taking the frenzied guitar attacks, hypnotic grooves and dreamy melodic hooks of their early work and setting it to a more expansive sonic template, one that takes in synth flourishes, psychedelic folk, electronic beats and noir-pop soundscapes. It has been a period of adversity in the world of Ride. Much of that was down to writing and recording during a pandemic – a period of adversity shared by everyone, everywhere – but there was also break-ups and a messy legal battle with an ex-manager that, singer and guitarist Mark Gardener states, “threatened our very existence.” It has instilled in the record a feeling of defiance, an album that pairs classic Ride lyrical hallmarks such as escapism, dreams, the dissatisfaction of modern life, yearning and freedom with a sense of resilience. Songs began springing up in a variety of ways. Initially working at Gardener’s own OX4 studio, there were extended jams from which pieces of music would be honed upon and reworked into something more concise whilst each band member also brought in their own home-recorded demos to work from too. That everything was filtered through what happens when the four-piece play in a room together is alluded to the record’s title.

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Ride-Interplay-24BIT-48KHZ-WEB-FLAC-2024-RUIDOS
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 00:58:46 minutes | 753 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover

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Ride – Weather Diaries (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 52:15 minutes | 593 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Shoegaze
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Wichita Recordings

Ride are making a return thanks to the shoegaze movement: and their resurrection has been eagerly awaited. 21 years after Tarantula, their third album which was not long remembered, the Oxford group are relaunching an act which was very popular across the Channel in the 1990s. With Weather Diaries, Mark Gardener and Andy Bell have not lost their touch for writing, but they have eliminated a number of purely shoegaze options. The Ride of 2017 is now a lot more pop and plays with guitars and synths, keeping their eyes on choruses that hit the mark, and melodies that stick around. Even if British pop won’t quite be rocked to its foundations by this fourth album, it is hard to contain one’s pleasure at this comeback.

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Ride – This Is Not A Safe Place (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 50:40 minutes | 596 MB | Genre: Shoegaze, Dreampop, Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Wichita Recordings

‘This Is Not a Safe Place’ sees the rejuvenated Oxford four piece reunite with revered DJ, producer and remixer Erol Alkan, who was on production duties for 2017’s ‘Weather Diaries’. Rekindling that creative partnership has once again seen Ride push their sound forward, as hypnotic rhythms and washes of lush guitars come together with leftfield electronic influences. The combination creates a sound rich in their trademark shoegaze atmosphere, whilst simultaneously sounding fresh and creatively ambitious.

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