“Dreams Burn Down” (1990) – Ride * Written by Ride * CD: Nowhere * Produced by Mark Waterman * Label: Creation
On Nowhere, their first full-length CD, Ride presented themselves as Lords of the Storms, setting up—perhaps unknowingly—a ready-to-market neosurf niche for themselves that might have led them paradoxically into a more adventurous and coherent direction had they embraced it. Imagine a reinvented British surf music scene that drew endless inspiration from the moody Atlantic ocean. The surfing industry wouldn’t need actual songs about boards to attach itself to such a genre. The Nowhere album is now a prompt for the term “shoegaze,” but songs like “Dreams Burn Down” show too much command and panoramic vision for the term. Album number two should have kept going with the ocean-view concept, but it went instead for a face with peeled cucumbers blocking its vision.