Cartoon entitled "I wonder what those two can see in each other" by Charles Dana Gibson, 1925
I recently acquired "the second best shoegaze album ever made". That's kind of a sad way to describe the achievement that is Nowhere by Ride, but it's what they're stuck with thanks to My Bloody Valentine. Released in 1990, Nowhere came a year before Loveless, but it wasn't the defining statement of shoegaze's new wall of sound that the latter album was. For me, though, that works in Nowhere's favor - I can enjoy the album on it's own merits, and I have to admit that I really enjoy it.
The album's openers "Seagull" and "Kaleidoscope", and its closer, the string-laden juggernaut "Vapour Trail", are amazing singles that frame a famously impenetrable middle section of five songs. Although I agree that it is appropriate to group the middle songs together, I enjoy this stretch of the album the most. The songs are, for the most part, leisurely mid-tempo numbers that focus on different approaches to the swirling noise of shoegaze. "Dreams Burn Down" makes use of chiming arpeggios and "Decay" uses pounding drums to create a propulsive rumble, while "Paralysed" throws some harpsichord into the mix because - well, why not? The best of them, though, is "Polar Bear", a song that seems to be about a girl, not a bear (a she-bear?), who thinks she can fly. The title is key, though, in creating the image of arctic winds washing over you that is reinforced throughout the album and by the its bleak cover art and title. The song has a crystalline beauty in the layering of the vocals and the panned and phased guitar. The best bit comes after the three-minute mark when the tom rolls drop away suddenly and a clean acoustic guitar strum takes the lyric back to its opening lines one more time.
"Polar Bear" by Ride
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