Kevin Bronson on April 9th, 2015

1

The Ride reunion tour should be called “Let’s Pretend Britpop Never Happened.”

Really, we’re better off that way. The best British music of the 1990s (it says here) was released between 1990 and ’92 by the Oxford quartet, the shooting stars of the Creation Records label whose unfortunate late-career artistic turns (forgivable, given the commercial pressures of the time) and ensuing breakup in 1996 relegated them to cult status. Notable for its marriage of harmony and noise, its dreamy/frenetic dynamic dichotomy and next-level pop song structures, Ride’s music has proven as much of a benchmark in the shoegazing genre as more-heralded My Bloody Valentine.

• ||| Photos by David Benjamin

They announced their reunion in November, played a comeback show Sunday night on their Oxford home turf and arrived in Los Angeles this week as a second-liner on the bill at Coachella, the highest-profile reunion act at a festival that likes it when people get back together. Will they shine like Pulp or the Pixies? Or will they bomb like the Stone Roses and Outkast?

Ride’s warmup show Wednesday night at the Roxy Theatre strongly suggested the former. The band — all-original members Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Laurence “Loz” Colbert and Steve Queralt — gave a sublime 100-minute performance that should have been mandatory listening for current practitioners of shoegaze and dream-pop music, and their fans. If, as the band has said, they resisted their fans’ pleas for so many years because of fears the quartet would not live up to their past, Wednesday night’s show must have allayed them.

“We all know deep down that the legacy was so strong that all you can do is muck it up by coming back and doing this,” singer-guitarist Gardener told KCRW host Jason Bentley on “Morning Becomes Eclectic” earlier in the day. “That’s why we knew that if we came back we needed to move up another level of development from where we left off.”

Their turn at the Roxy certainly achieved a high level, with Gardener in his now-signature fedora looking as happy as he’s ever been. At his various Los Angeles appearances over the years — behind his 2005 solo album, promoting the Creation Records documentary and even celebrating the anniversary of Ride’s 1992 album “Going Blank Again” doing a tour backed by members of L.A.’s Sky Parade — the 45-year-old has always intimated he’d be up for continuing Ride’s legacy.

Mending fences, especially with Bell (who went on to play in Hurricane #1, Oasis and Beady Eye), took some time, as did the basic logistics of reassembling four musicians who have been “doing our own bits and pieces along the way,” Gardener said.”It’s not like we’ve been sitting around with our slippers on and a pipe kind of waiting for this to happen.

“It’s been quite a long process. We’ve been good and speaking for a long time, and we’ve always been getting together each year, and we’ve always been aware of kind of the groundswell. … That volume seemed to get louder and louder, with people asking all the time, ‘Will Ride ever play again?’ It was kind of that eternal question for me and for all of us.”

Wednesday’s show at the Roxy came one day short of the 24th anniversary of Ride’s Los Angeles debut (with Lush), also at the Sunset Strip venue.

“It’s so nice to be playing here again like this,” Gardener beamed.

The 17-song setlist hit most of the high points of “Ride: OX4,” the 2001 greatest-hits compilation which is being re-released on double vinyl, and concentrated on material from their first two albums and first three EPs. They started with “Polar Bear” and “Seagull” (two of seven songs they played from 1990’s “Nowhere,” a masterpiece of swirling guitars) before eliciting howl of delight as the crowd recognized the opening riff of the 1992 single “Twisterella,” their most well-known song in the U.S.

They ignored their 1994 third album “Carnival of Light,” a straight-ahead psych-pop album that disappointed fans at the time (the band wasn’t too keen on it in hindsight, either) and played only one song, the crunchy single “Black Nite Crash,” from their last release, 1996’s “Tarantula.”

As these affair go, it was a night to yield to nostalgia, and certain moments evoked more emotion than others. There were more than a few wet eyes when the languid chord progression of “Vapour Trail” kicked in, with Bell plaintive and beautiful throughout as a neatly tucked backing track played the string section. “Dreams Burn Down” reinforced with importance of Colbert’s furious and furiously complex drumming in Ride’s music; it’s nonpareil in the genre. And if you didn’t get a vision of horizontal-striped shirts during the bombastic-turned-dreamy opening of “Like a Daydream,” you probably weren’t there back in the day. Gardener’s still-cherubic voice is, though, sighing “The way your hair’s down on you, it hides away your face / For you it’s perfect but it seems like such a waste.”

Ride’s first encore was a single song, the 8-minute epic “Leave Them All Behind,” which opened that 1992 album.

They finished the evening with the song that introduced them, “Chelsea Girl,” which opens with the line “Take me for a ride away / from the places we have known …” When that “Smile” EP came out in 1990, that was almost a rallying cry. Now that they are revisiting the places they have known, Ride seems to be taking things one tenuous step at a time.

Asked on KCRW whether they have thought about making new music, Bell said he doesn’t discount “the possibility … but I think we need to nail these shows first and satisfy the nostalgia out there and do everyone proud and see where we are in a couple months.

Said Gardener: “We’re just trying to enjoy right now.”

Setlist:

Polar Bear
Seagull
Twisterella
Unfamiliar
Cool Your Boots
Black Nite Crash
OX4
Dreams Burn Down
Time of Her Time
Chrome Waves
Paralysed
Taste
Vapour Trail
Drive Blind
Leave Them All Behind
Like a Day Dream
Chelsea Girl