If Weather Diaries back in 2017 was something that was never going to live up to the expectations surrounding it, this new one from Ride is a good deal better. This Is Not A Safe Place, out today via Wichita Recordings, re-affirms what able songwriters these players can be, and how adept they each remain at nimbly leaping over the narrow expectations prescribed for the shoegaze form. Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Loz Colbert, and Steve Queralt contribute their individual pieces to This Is Not A Safe Place in such a way that the album feels marvelously varied and wonderfully homogenic.
If the first song on the new Ride album, "R.I.D.E.", sounds a bit like Curve, and "Kill Switch" sounds like Nineties-era The Jesus and Mary Chain, leave it to Steve Queralt's "Eternal Recurrence" to take things further afield, such that the number feels nearly like something from Seafeel. On first listen, This Is Not A Safe Place seems scattershot, a tour through the many moods of Ride, those that inspired others for decades. However, on each subsequent listen, the record reveals how all these pieces -- each idea offered from each player in the quartet -- make up a release that is pointing in one nearly-metaphysical direction: escape from the horrors of the everyday. "Clouds of Saint Marie" is both "Cali" and "Dreams Burn Down" updated, the pop song about a place as much as a mood, while "Future Love" is "Drive Blind" smoothed completely down and reconstructed for a future that's now staring us right in our old faces. Less an attempt to recapture past glories, and more stabs at transcendence in an increasingly-horrific world, numbers like these stand as instant classics from these cats.
Elsewhere, "Shadows Behind The Sun", a Gardener number, I think, sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing Andy Bell brought to that unfairly-neglected second album from Beady Eye. It's an elegiac number that succeeds precisely because Ride know exactly how much to hold back. "This world breaks everybody" goes part of this, echoing what seems a real theme here, especially so on a release called This Is Not A Safe Place, and the tune trails out with a pinging that very nicely, and deftly, seems to recall "Wichita Lineman", that Jimmy Webb-penned, Glen Campbell classic. And while there's little subtle about the silly "Repetition", the players at least try to amp things up a bit on the funky "Jump Jet" with its decent New Order-throb. The cut is one of the better up-tempo numbers on this new record, even as the release thrives thanks to the solid songwriting behind the slower ones.
This Is Not A Safe Place rarely feels like the kind of rexord where the band is trying to prove something again. It does, however, feel like the kind of record where the four musicians feel free to indulge a bit. And it's something to be thankful for that their moments of indulgence resulted in something so cohesive and enjoyable, the kind of album that reminds not just what skillful players these four dudes are, but what a wonderful thing indie-pop can be.
This Is Not A Safe Place is out today via Wichita Recordings.
More details on Ride via the official website.
[Photo: Steve Gullick]