New This Week: Ride, Original Album Series

It’s been a good couple of years for Ride fans: the band got back together in late 2014, spent a good chunk of 2015 performing live dates in Europe and North America, and now that they’re back on the radar of America music fans in a big way, we’re releasing an Original Album Series box set featuring five discs.

“But wait!” you shout. “Ride only had four studio albums!”

Indeed they did, but there’s a fifth disc in the mix nonetheless. To clarify the situation, allow us to lay out the contents of the set for you.

First up, there’s 1990’s Nowhere, the band’s debut full-length release and a stone cold classic, and not just because it includes “Vapour Trail.” It’s been included on Spin’s 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years (1985-2014), and it’s also contained within the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. If this doesn’t clarify its timelessness, then we don’t really know what will. Next comes 1992’s Going Blank Again, which found Ride avoiding the sophomore slump and doing things a bit poppier than they’d done the first time around, as best heard on the album’s first single, “Leave Them All Behind.” After that came 1994’s Carnival of Light, on which the band said goodbye to shoegaze and fully embraced the wonderful world of psychedelia, earning much street cred for their decision to cover The Creation’s “How Does It Feel to Feel?” Lastly on the studio-album front, there’s 1996’s Tarantula, which is certainly something you’ll want to own if you’re a Ride completist, even if it might not be the band’s greatest album. (This is not to say it’s all bad, mind you: “Black Nite Crash” continues to be top-notch even 20 years on.)

Oh, right, we didn’t tell you about that fifth disc: it’s Cosmic Carnival, a compilation which had originally only been released in Japan.

Here’s the track listing:

1. At the End of the Universe
2. I Don’t Know Where It Comes From
3. Let’s Get Lost
4. Don’t Let It Die
5. Walkabout
6. Moonlight Medicine
7. Rolling Thunder #2
8. I Don’t Know Where It Comes From
9. Journey to the End of the Universe

If you play the whole set from start to finish, you get a long Ride. (Get it?) Thankfully, though, it’s a very good Ride, and it’s one that’s well worth taking.