Ride: Interplay (digital outlets)

Once the bright hope of shoegaze in the Britpop era, Oxford's Ride lost momentum with Carnival of Light after two fine albums and broke up.

Their sound had been a template which – while it borrowed from Jesus and Mary Chain a little and the Manchester sound – was highly appealing.

The band also had two excellent songwriters in Mark Gardener (who enjoyed a very decent solo career) and Andy Bell who became the bassist in Oasis and Beady Eye.

They reformed a few years ago and came back as a rather good but more straight-ahead rock band with some shoegaze tendencies.

Here on their seventh album, third since the reunion, they surge into heroic synth-rock (Monaco), some seriously good drone-pop which pumps up Joy Division into guitar rock (Last Frontier) and dive down into the mystery, whispery Floyd-like Yesterday is Just a Song.

There is a certain amount of looking back on Interplay, not to their former selves but to stadium-filling synth-pop bands and the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen's swelling grandiosity (I Came to See the Wreck).

Essaouira (named for the city in Morocco) is more along the prog-rock line with loops and disembodied vocals with the song only taking shape a few minutes into its seven minutes.

So Ride have made some bold decisions and haven't been nostalgic (at least not for their own past).

But while the branching out and experimental, psychedelic attitude is admirable, Interplay is a very much an album of risks taken, but about half of them not paying off.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here