Sunday, July 31, 2011
A song a day: Ride - Leave them all behind
Make no mistake, I love My Bloody Valentine but when I first heard Loveless my brain couldn't really comprehend what I was hearing. Seriously, it was like watching a dog stand on its hind legs and start reciting the Shakespeare - the synapses did not fire and I was just totally confused. About a year later, I had a pretty solid crush on this goth girl (a crush it would remain) but she was the biggest (and probably the first Ride fan) I'd ever met. She even went to Brisbane to see them and bumped into them walking around the Queen Street Mall. They were bored waiting for soundcheck so they all decided to go to the movies - yes, it's true, goth crush girl went to the movies with Ride. However, through the exposure I received to Ride and other showgaze bands, it eventually led me back to and form a deep love for Loveless. Ride made similar sounds but in a pop context that my brain could understand at first flush. To me it almost seems laughable now that I couldn't understand MBV at that time but that's the truth of it. As such, Ride have played an important point in my musical education and as such, I pay tribute to them here. While my favourite record is the Today Forever ep, Leave Them All Behind is such an epic song - wall of sound guitars, gorgeous vocals and a momentum that makes 8 minutes(!) pass very quickly. And all the cute girls liked Ride, even if MBV were better...
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hmmm sometimes it takes a poppy instance of a general movement to interface with first.
ReplyDeletePlus 1 Ride fan here. From the Smile EP to Going Blank. I even got Nowhere recently. In retrospect they're not *great* - but very representative of an era - almost fresh and naive for that era - but still.
Shoegaze was my prep for Spacemen/Spiritualized - which I've recently starting thinking of as an early Post-Rock phenom. With drugs.
Similar for me. I had gotten into MBV, and had my mind blown completely by them. However, as a guitar player, I couldn't "grok" how Shields did it- keep in mind samples, and looping were somewhat new in a rock context, so I didn't fully understand that he was playing, sampling, looping and layering the loops, like a Public Enemy or Beastie Boys. Minus that technique, I could hear how Ride were doing it: it was an application of delay and distortion that was the exact opposite of how a Psychedelic band would've done it. Strange, but understandable. I could then apply some of the techniques to my playing, which then led to me understanding how Kevin Shields started from an almost Heavy Metal reliance upon effects and sheer volume, but then, used recording techniques that had heretofore been electronic in application to create those very odd songs. Basically, while MBV were the ultimate revolutionaries in how I approach making music, without Ride, I never would have gotten there.
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