Ride is a band cursed with awful timing. When the quartet formed near Oxford University and started recording for England's Creation Records in the early '90s, its sweeping, swirling trance rock was out of step with the prevailing trend toward grunge. During the course of three albums, the group grew into making 1994's beautifully textured Carnival of Light, which updated '60s psychedelic rock ranging from the Incredible String Band to the Creation (the band that gave the label its name) to the Rolling Stones circa Their Satanic Majesties Request. Once again, Ride were ahead of their time with American listeners, who are now enthusiastically embracing Oasis for similar though much less ambitious accomplishments.

Tarantula and Live Light are the final offerings from Ride in their present incarnation. Guitarists and songwriters Mark Gardener and Andy Bell are parting ways, and although Bell may forge ahead with Ride's rhythm section, the key to the band's appeal has always been the interaction between the group's two driving forces. Like the Beatles' Let It Be, Tarantula is a studio document of a band unraveling, and it's full of clues about the split. "A friend of mine, one of the few/Has locked himself away like Howard Hughes/They're trying to replace him, but they know they never will/It ain't the same without him on the castle on the hill," Bell sings in the melancholic acoustic ballad "Castle on the Hill." But the album is saved from maudlin self-obsession because it's rawer and rocks harder than anything else Ride have recorded. The band abandons the elaborate keyboard and string arrangements of Carnival of Light in favor of propulsive rhythms, angry guitars and a bare-bones soulfulness reminiscent of the Stones' Beggars Banquet or vintage Small Faces ("A Trip Down Ronnie Lane" is an outtake from the album sessions that appears on the single for "Black Nite Crash").

Although the English music press labeled Ride a band of "shoe gazers," the group was always a vital force onstage, thanks to Bell and Gardener's two-guitar attack and the Keith Moon-style playing of drummer Laurence Colbert. Live Light captures the band performing in March '94 at the Arapaho, in Paris, with a set that stretches from the sunny impressionism of "Chelsea Girl" and "Close My Eyes," from 1990's Smile, to the more mature and complex musings of "From Time to Time" and "Only Now," from Carnival of Light. (The disc doesn't include any of the songs from Tarantula.) Unlike Ride's studio albums, including Tarantula, Live Light is not essential to own. But it is illuminating – and not only because the group never got to perform many of these songs in the United States. Both of Ride's farewell albums show that the group was a cohesive and inspired unit up to the end, pursuing its distinctive vision despite internal conflicts and the vagaries of the music industry. (RS 732)

JIM DEROGATIS