OX4: The Best of Ride brings together the best tracks from Ride's brief but bright reign. Much maligned throughout the Britpop years, Oxford's Ride were to be remembered as the progenitors of shoegazing, a movement that dominated the early 90s indie scene with a personality-free strain of skyscraping noise-rock. Fortunately, in hindsight, a listen to OX4: The Best of Ride displays a very different band: a group determined to break out of the self-imposed boundaries of British rock music by drawing on the extremities of the Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain, and harnessing their explosive rush to pop songs that fizzed with the enthusiasm of youth. From their glorious, passionate inception on their first two EPs, Ride and Play (see the starry-eyed clatter of "Chelsea Girl", and the heart-stealing harmonic jangle of "Like a Daydream") to their growth into champions of retrodelica, with Carnival of Light-era tracks such as "I Don't Know Where It Comes From" summoning classic tunes out of the ether, Ride sounded like true pioneers. The closing, Rolling Stones-pillaging "Black Night Crash", from the poorly-received Tarantula LP is the only really pointless inclusion here, the sound of a band burnt out. But that leaves OX4 with a pretty impressive strike rate.-- Louis Pattison
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