My Top 1000 Songs #387: Taste

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Here's another one from that brief shoegaze heyday back in the late 80s/early 90s--that window when I was trying to bridge the gap between the college radio bands that got me through the 80s (R.E.M., Replacements, etc.) and the indie rock bands that would carry me through the 90s (Pavement, Yo La Tengo, etc.). One of the songs I most closely associate with that era is Ride's "Taste," from their 1990 debut Nowhere. It's a fizzy blast of noise pop that takes the retro-psychedelic Britpop of the Stone Roses and grinds it through a post-Jesus and Mary Chain wall of distortion. The result is both relentlessly catchy and aggressive, a chiming, ethereal pop tune behind gauzy sandpaper. Light enough to simply float away, but still sticks with me.

Live 1991: