Early on in Ride’s set at The Fonda on December 19, as the band played “Dreams Burn Down,” the spotlights danced furiously with every wave of guitar noise that crashed over the crowd. Small specks of light flickered across the dark walls of the theater, burning out as soon as the shoegaze interludes cut back to the song. Everything was tightly choreographed, the lights and sound so in sync with each other that it was as if I had been swallowed by the music. When you can imagine the music as this living, breathing entity and you are, if only for a moment, existing in the belly of it, it’s an amazing, and rare, feeling.
This was my first Ride concert and, honestly, I think it’s an ideal time to see the band. While I love the now-classic albums, Nowhere and Going Blank Again, Ride released an album this year, Interplay, that’s a career best. It’s a fantastic collection of psychedelic guitar pop and one of my favorite albums of 2024. If you haven’t heard it yet, you should fix that asap.
I’ve been listening to Interplay since it was released earlier this year and had wanted to finally catch Ride on this tour. In fact, I was about to check for tickets when my friend Melissa was all like, just won tickets to see Ride, want to go with me? Of course, I did. This was an even better opportunity. Melissa and I have been friends since sometime around Y2K, when we crossed paths nerding out over British bands first in a chat room and then IRL at places like Cafe Bleu, a club night in West Hollywood at the time where you could actually dance to “Twisterella” and sway to “Vapour Trail.” Yet, neither of us had seen Ride before, so this was bound to be a memorable night.
We arrived on Thursday night in time to catch Rocket, the openers. They’re a local and have a sound that’s best described as ‘90s college radio. In other words, you could easily place any song the band played in between Superchunk’s “Driveway to Driveway” and Sunny Day Real Estate’s “In Circles” and the set would make sense. Honestly, I was impressed by how well Rocket nailed the sound of such a particular point in time, whether or not they’re doing that intentionally. I might have thought I slipped into a time warp if it weren’t for the fact that their between-song banter was far too eloquent and, frankly, gracious, for a ‘90s indie band. It’s interesting how media-savvy musicians are now that there are cameras everywhere and almost no actual music press left, but that’s another story.
During their first run, Ride was, essentially, the link between the post-punk ‘80s and Britpop ‘90s. Listen to their early singles and albums and you can hear echoes of The Smiths, The Cure and Jesus & Mary Chain in the way they juxtapose guitar pop melodies with big jolts of noise. Ride lasted until the middle of the 1990s, with later albums like Carnival of Light and Tarantula bearing a glossier, more commercial radio-friendly sound than the band’s earlier work. A few years after their breakup, Andy Bell, who alongside Mark Gardener, sings and plays guitar in Ride, joined Oasis. That’s the part of their timeline with which I’m most familiar, but, after reforming briefly in the early ‘00s, Ride got back together for a 2015 reunion tour and have released three full-length albums since then.
Ride essentially merged those two timelines onstage at The Fonda. They opened with “Monaco,” which is my favorite song on Interplay, and played a set that was roughly split even between the band’s first and second wave. (FYI, I double-checked the songs I recalled from the show with the Set List FM recap.) I appreciated the way they placed new and old material next to each other throughout the set. It gives listeners points of reference for the ones with which they might be less familiar if, for example, the exceptionally dreamy “Light in a Quiet Room,” from Interplay, turns up alongside “Leave Them All Behind” in the encore.
It was also nice that Ride dropped the fan favorites throughout the set. “Dreams Burn Down” hit near the beginning and the song’s quiet-loud dynamic pointed to how good the sound was for this show. There’s a lot that can go wrong with noisy, guitar-based music. Sometimes, it’s painfully loud. Other times, the vocals drown in the mix or it just generally sounds muddy. None of that happened here. This was was noisy, but clean. Plus, you could feel the music. Much later in the 90-minute performance, when the band played “Seagull,” I suddenly learned exactly how this song should be heard, with the rhythm penetrating through the soles of your shoes and vibrating up your legs.
In case you were wondering, of course they played “Vapour Trail.” Ride busted out “Twisterella,” my personal favorite from the band’s first wave, in Los Angeles as well. But— I feel like I need to stress this— it wasn’t just about the oldies. “Peace Sign,” from Interplay, had the crowd waving peace signs in the air. The song is an earworm, one that’s been burrowing in and out of my brain since the show ended. I literally woke up with it stuck in my head this morning, several days after the show.
Melissa and I launched into a post-concert recap as soon as the GTFO lights started to rise in the venue and we kept it going throughout the drive home. We both loved hearing the new songs. (I mentioned “Monaco.” She mentioned “Portland Rocks.”) Melissa also said something that stuck with me. She said that, because of the show, she realized that there’s a chunk of Ride releases that she missed. I noticed too that there were songs that I couldn’t place at all, mainly because I don’t recall hearing either Weather Diaries or This Is Not a Safe Place. So, I’m listening to those albums now specifically because of Thursday night’s show.
The other thing that didn’t quite hit me until I started writing this is that Ride’s show at The Fonda was 100% a you-had-to-be-there sort of event. It’s not the sort of thing that translates to Instagram well because the visual is secondary to the music. Hell, most of us in the crowd probably couldn’t see all of what they were doing on stage and it didn’t matter because it’s really about what they were playing and how that transformed the room.
The stage itself was simple and the backdrop, with Ride written in big letters, was off-center. TBH, the banner’s hidden E nagged at me during the show, but, in retrospect, I think it’s a smart, albeit likely unintentional, comment on concerts in 2024. You, the person in the audience, know that the E is there and who cares what the people who peep your story as they mindlessly scroll think. Let them think you saw Rid and leave them all behind on the vapour trail, Twisterella!
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs.
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