Melody Maker was one of three weekly UK music magazines. They tried desperately hard to be cool and edgy, and loved to build bands up before knocking them down.

The writing was often awful – trying way too hard to be cool. This review is a perfect example. Is it positive or negative? Maybe both – it’s saying a lot of good things but laying the foundations to give the bands a good kicking when the time is wrote.

The text below is extracted from the article to make it easier to read.

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RIDE / SLOWDIVE – MANCHESTER ACADEMY

Ride, perhaps, are just too much. Too soon, too quick, too assured, too contemporary, too praised, too openly derivative to even be insulted by being called derivative. Too, thank you, Everett, damn young and beautiful. Certainly far, far too much like what the result would be if a committee of disaffected pop scrawlers were to sit down with a lump of modelling clay and some haircut ideas and construct a cover story. Ride have it all – an embarrassment of riches. We’re talking silver spoons to start with here. A firm grip on their time, poise to shame the young Newman and, gracing the visage of their singer, lips that could kick-start a Harley. As the overly laconic commentator said of God the keeper: they dive to follow, miss, like a penalty against the dead.

Perfection breeds suspicion: all of the above is what makes Ride so intensely vaguely annoying, despite the fact you want them to be brilliant. That, and their alarming tendency to lapse into the realm of enigma-by-numbers twee misty romanticism (an album called Nowhere, a new EP titled Today Forever, endless lyrical references to dreams, etc.). Their promise is immense, but on record and in theory, Ride’s shortcomings outweigh their now-happenings. Boldly.

However, Ride do have some melodies (you remember) of elephantine proportions, and for that they are forgiven. Almost.

So I come not to bury Ride – not as such – rather instead to clatter them lightly about the ears with the shove and wish aloud that they’d hurry up and make a suitably heroic shambles of something (anything!), because stars are never terribly interesting when it all looks so easy – because it looks like they’re not taking any chances.

As it happens though, Ride play an utter blinder. And support Slowdive – a temptingly slow-moving target if ever there was one – also deftly skirt the slings and arrows of outrageous expectations by turning in a performance as cool as it is nervous (some great paradox, that) and manifestly prove that their blurred, hazy sound is so impeccably serene that the actual writing of songs to accompany them would seem an exercise in deluded superfluity.

(There’s a minor thesis to be knocked up somewhere here about how Creation must be the most incestuous label this side of Flying Nun. Just as Ride are My Bloody Valentine without the fatal world-weariness, so Slowdive are Ride disconnected from their fairly traditional rock ’n’ roll heritage. Which doesn’t leave Slowdive with much other than guitars, precocity, and the sound. Which is early Mary Chain anyway. Which was The Byrds to begin with. My head hurts.)

Wake up, class. Ride are magnificent tonight. They fail to disappoint so marvellously because they’re willing to play with some sense of abandon. Where their periodic fuzz wig-outs sound on record as if they should be prefaced by Yeah, this is the bit where we’re supposed to go bwam bwom, odd, innit?, live they’re… well, a stampede by a slavering horde of delinquent leather-clad death angels, charging the glittering silver gates of oblivion at the very least.

Not bad at all!

And the tunes! The tunes, readers, are occasionally within shouting distance of the miraculous. If we leave aside “Taste” – which is a Hummingbirds B-side (Hollow Inside, if you want to get picky), only not as good – there’s the mighty “Like a Daydream,” a subtle, layered creation Hüsker Dü wouldn’t have disowned in a hurry; there’s the four new songs on the new EP, which run the gamut from glorious to superb; and then they do the encores. They play “Dreams Burn Down,” “Chelsea Girl,” “Nowhere,” and “Seagulls.” The crowd react moderately hysterically and Gardener shrugs, smiles a bit, waves, and says thanks. And shrugs again. To the manner born, most definitely.

Effortlessly cool, just like the song says. Now I’m a believer.

Within reasonable reservations.

Andrew Muller