The Singles Jukebox

Speaking of comebacks…

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[4.17]

David Sheffieck: An important and obvious question when embarking on a reunion project: How can you recapture what you once had? A more important question — and one Ride overlooked — how can you manage it when there was nothing there to begin with?
[2]

Tim de Reuse: Back in the day, Ride sounded like a ’90s pop-rock outfit with the pedalboards of a shoegaze band. Today, apparently, they’re just kind of a mess; the production feels trapped between a desire to modernize and clean up and a fear of straying too far from their roots, overcompressed and limp. Behind that awkward surface there’s a decent tune with a chorus that kneecaps the driving momentum of the verses and a bridge that’s more engrossing than anything before it, but gets killed right when it could’ve started getting changing the song’s course for the better.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: What I remember about Nowhere is that, like a lot of the first wave shoegaze canon, it sounded and felt extraordinarily huge. So it caught me off guard to hear Ride brought down to size and, more jarringly, so human. They no longer have the benefit of a veil of mystique or a novelty of adding a fuck ton of reverb, so they sound not all that different from kids making rip-offs of bands ripping off Ride. But at least they don’t sound too revivalist, since their sound is still in vogue after all these years.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Like descendants Cloud Nothings, who last month straightened their curves and used ceiling fans to dispel electric fire fumes from their tunings, these gazers of shoes proffer the simplest chord progressions of their career for — what, a charm assault? Why not. If emulating Get the Knack with less volatile drumming works… 
[6]

Iain Mew: My favourite album of 2016 was nu-shoegaze, so an update by one of the originals is something that might easily appeal. For as long as they just add a little extra power to the familiarly hazy river of guitar, indeed it does, but that clashes badly with the anthem bits that suggest a little too much time spent with Oasis.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Even Andy Bell gets to sound like a boring old man, desperately trying to get it up with the riffs that used to charge him up as a boy. Ride at their best were never particularly impotent, just sort of pleasantly imbecilic with how charming they could be in crude reaches to pleasure. At the same time, there’s a point where the things that suited you as a youth now make you look sad when you fight against time.
[2]