So there can be no second acts in public life eh? Well F Scott Fitzgerald never was in a second-rate, wall-of-effects fuzz-band from the early 1990's so what does he know?
Mark Gardiner and Loz Colbert who once sucked in the rarefied air of straight-in-at-Number 75 indie-stardom with Ride are obviously hoping that those heady moments were only a dry-run for new band The Animalhouse.
After all his old mucker Andy Bell only landed up in Oasis so he hasn't really much to live down to. Gardiner had one of those floppy-lipped faces that like Naked Chef Jamie Oliver's you'd be hard-pressed to ever tire of smacking with a shovel.
That pretty much summed Ride up. A fey, low-fat polyunsaturated Quorn burger of a band that seemed irritatingly embarrassed to have anybody staring at them. Shoegazing as it was known, was all that we had back then, when the only hi-glamour alternatives were Kingmaker and Cud.
Well thankfully The Animalhouse are a totally different stripe of rock'n'roll animal otherwise all us poor long-suffering music-critics would have all chipped in to have some Yardie sort 'em out, like.
Opener and last single 'Small' is a sinewy snatch of bad attitude and not terribly unlike Gay Dad's 'Joy'. That's no bad thing whatsoever. 'Animalhouse' the song is as intoxicating as Animalhouse the band -a thickly perfumed puff of Krishna-beardy-Beatles and early angular Cure.
'Speakeasy' is both doleful yet uplifting whilst 'Sodium Glow' is redolent of Ride in their prime and therefore very rubbish indeed.
'Ready to Receive' is a far better album than anybody could ever have expected given the rather suspect pedigree of its chief protagonists. Use that as a benchmark though, and 45 minutes of your ex-girlfriend going at it in the bedroom next door would be far easier on the ear.
