Ride WEATHER DIARIES

During a 27-month period in which they released four EPs and two albums, Ride grew from a charmingly scruffy composite of inspirations into a source of gleaming nuggets that mixed power pop and dream pop with confident emphasis on the former. At the end of this phase, Ride recorded a song about entering a time machine. When the band reappeared two years later, they sounded and looked as if they had taken one through the late '60s. A couple years after that, album four arrived with the band no longer intact, their farewell single a backslide across Primal Scream's retracing of Stones/Faces steps. After nearly 20 years spent mostly apart -- they met up in 2001 to record an improvisation for a Sonic Youth documentary -- Ride re-formed for gigs, then recorded their fifth album with production from Erol Alkan and mixing from old partner Alan Moulder. Considering Ride's fast and prolific early development, the museum phase that followed, and two decades of near silence, Weather Diaries isn't