Tulip Frenzy

After something like a four-year wait, we were delighted with the news that a new song by The Black Ryder was posted on Stereogum.

Back in early 2010, Tulip Frenzy brought forth upon this land an early look at The Black Ryder’s debut, Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride, which we’d damn near had to swim to Australia to find.  Our motivation for diving in the Pacific, credit card in hand, was simple: Aimee Nash and Scott Van Ryper had been core members of The Morning After Girls, whose early recordings were an almost perfect blend of both the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, and the songs that first were released by what then was known, in e.e. cummings lowercase lettering, as the black ryder, were simply awesome.

There are different ways one can measure a great record, but the two that matter are whether it has the potential to change the world, and whether years later you still play it regularly. Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride might not have changed the world, but from the full spectrum of Tulip Frenzy’s 2010 Top Ten List (c), this album today gets called to earbud duty every bit as much as that year’s winner, Darker My Love’s Alive As You Are.  There is the squall of guitars laying a pea-soup shroud of noise fog on Aimee Mann’s ethereal vocals, the drama of the songwriting revealing the hidden truth that these guys likely were what made the early Morning After Girls records so beguiling.  This was shoegaze music that got into the bones, that sunk into the marrow, that once in the head could not be eradicated.  Because of our regular playing of it, we have become intimately aware of the topography of our desert boots, the fray of our shoelaces. We play it all the time.

So the fact that The Black Ryder will, in early 2015, release The Door Behind The Door is reason for celebration, reason for optimism, the best news on the planet in an otherwise pretty dreary week.

This entry was posted on October 4, 2014 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Aimee Nash, Scott Van Ryper, the black ryder, The Door Behind The Door, The Morning After Girls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.