This Is Not a Safe Place

The Oxford band’s second album since their 2014 reformation benefits from a wealth of creativity and experimentation that Bell may well have been suppressing for over 20 years.

It might well be their best album yet. [Sep 2019, p.116]

From the shoegaze-tinged jangle-pop of 'Future Love', to the dreamy indie of 'Clouds of Saint Marie', Ride sound incredibly fresh-faced.

The album is most interesting when it eschews from the guidelines.

As the sophomore sequence of their second wind, it does enough differently to set itself apart from Weather Diaries while also existing as a logical continuation of that foundation. It may not be as significant or memorable as it could be at times, but it's certainly an enveloping journey as it plays.

While these 12 songs shake no foundations, they hold their own. [Sep 2019, p.34]

This Is Not A Safe Place never quite finds its footing. The lyrics are a snapshot of the band’s current frame of mind—those recurring thoughts that fire when you turn in for the night. They’re deeply personal and never self-important, but also not particularly cohesive or thematic on the whole.

Not every experiment on This Is Not a Safe Place succeeds, but that’s okay; failures still signify work in progress, and we can all agree that a world in which Ride’s at work is always preferable to the alternative.

This Is Not a Safe Place is not, in the end, the classic Ride Mark 2 release that its first three songs so casually tease. But it has enough joy, verve and invention to suggest that Ride could get there one day.

Sadly, the difference here in 2019 is that reaching the end of This Is Not a Safe Place—listening to the whole album—is not as rewarding as it needed to be.

For those that grew up with the band that they would even release a second post reunion record is probably enough. For those that have joined the party late however, it does nothing we haven’t heard before. And unfortunately, those moments where the album soars instead of stalls, come too infrequently to leave any lasting impression.

Mixed results notwithstanding, This Is Not a Safe Place is further proof that these four musicians belong beside one another. They won't make the long-list for the Patrick Fitzgerald Shoegaze Poet Award, but they still create quite a sighing racket.

This Is Not a Safe Place is a fine album with some songs that, with time, could become Ride staples. However, there are times where the band crumble under the pressure of bringing both a progression in sound, as well as a catering to their older audiences.

Ride’s legacy is set in stone, but, in the end, most of This Is Not a Safe Place is not as wildly contentious in its desire to be different. After a strong start, more of that risk would have been welcome.

A chequered beast swiveling between ill-fitting newe adventures in growling rock electronica and hazy, '80s-throwback dram pop. It's somewhere between that Safe Place seem happiest, Eternal Recurrence, Jump Jet and End Game revisiting hazy, propulsive Ride territory of old--complete with the odd crap lyric--but the laidback, Syd Barrett-like Dial Up and arrhythmic, big-sounding In This Room show they still have genuine class. [Sep 2019, p.86]