This Is Not a Safe Place＜Silver Vinyl＞

Ride's second post-millennial album starts with two of their most contrasting songs. It's set off with an instrumental that, 27 years earlier, might have been licensed for a Gregg Araki soundtrack. Next is "Future Love," a golden-hour delight shimmering like nothing else in the band's catalog, albeit with rush-inducing harmonies and hurtling drums evoking their early days. Tempestuous extremes also characterize much of what follows on This Is Not a Safe Place. "End Game" presents a bleak flip side to "Future Love," recalling Faith-era Cure before a violent outburst amid Mark Gardener's resentful protestations of "What went wrong? What is wrong with you?" The downer mood is felt elsewhere in the pummeling "Kill Switch" and thrashing "Fifteen Minutes," a pair of antagonistic numbers fronted by Andy Bell. The guitars on the latter itself vacillate, generating Sonic Youth-like gentle hypnotism and then dropping the hammer almost exactly as those of Swervedriver did on "Duel." On the comparatively blithe "Repetition," Ride quote one of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's creativity-stimulating Oblique Strategies cards, and they maybe pulled "Use an old idea" a few times while writing and recording. Obvious above all else is "Clouds of Saint Marie," like "Vapor Trail" a wistful remembrance using condensed water as a metaphor for lost love. Whether the ideas are Ride's own or those of other bands, they tend to be good ones, slightly twisted or prized apart and rearranged. This Is Not a Safe Place is further proof that these four musicians belong beside one another. They still create quite a sighing racket. ~ Andy Kellman

復活作『Weather Diaries』が好意的に受け止められたライドが、それから2年で早くも新作をリリース。引き続きプロデューサーにエロル・アルカン、エンジニアにアラン・モウルダーという布陣で制作され、現代的なフレイヴァーを投影したアレンジは前作より格段に野心的なもの。懐古ムードを消費し終えて、本当の意味で解散前の続きのレーンに立ったような心意気も感じられる。4人の明らかな前進ぶりが好ましい快作だ。
bounce (C)夏野静