Seagull

from the LP Nowhere, Creation Records, 1990



“Wall of sound” is a phrase that’s tossed around quite a bit in the music world: Phil Spector’s recording studio techniques, the Grateful Dead’s touring setup from the mid-‘70s (care of the flipped out mind within Owsley “Bear” Stanley), and in more general terms, to explain the density of noise emanating from your speakers. In this case here, the track is literally a relentless wall of sound from the moment it begins; layers upon layers of delayed and distorted guitars, repetitive droning bassline, drums ablaze…all of it combining into a trenchant mass of sonic waves, a tsunami even, which makes the minimalist album cover-art very apropos. Ride were a short-lived, much-hyped UK band that fell into the subgenre dubbed ‘shoegazer’ by the British press; most of the bands labeled as such (My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Ride, Chapterhouse, Slowdive, et al) fervently fought the pigeonholing of such a contrived term, supposedly dubbed ‘shoegazer’ due to the habit of most band members staring at the floor while they played. Whatever you want to call this, it’s fucking BAD – ASS!! Into the vortex of sounds the listener falls, hearing all kinds of influences within the maelstrom of guitars and feedback: Velvet Underground, Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3…shit, you can even hear the Byrds. Throughout the thick hullabaloo, the commotion clears for brief enough spells to hear some singing, “my eyes are sore, my body weak…you gave me things I’d never seen, you made my life a waking dream…” The two guitarists, Andy Bell and Mark Gardner, sing some pleasant minor-chord harmonies here, simplistic but somehow hovering above the mix. Though the lyrics are mostly standard, druggy, esoteric prose, their delivery invokes pressing and dramatic emotional swings; “…my words are dead, falling like feathers to the floor…but we are dead, falling like ashes to the floor…” In a seeming posture to the press’s attempts to define their sound, they offer a dreamy epithet, “…definitions confine thoughts, they are a myth, words are clumsy, language doesn’t fit; but we know there’s no limit to thought, we know there’s no limits…” The whole shoegazer scene/sound, never as popular in the States as in the UK, was (like everything else) pushed aside by the whole “grunge” phenomena, and only over the past few years has it seen its just & deserved resurgence of sound and influence.