Pop Music Reviews : Ride Changes the Pace at Coach House

The young English band Ride offered two sorts of excursions Thursday night at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano: long sightseeing trips through psychedelic land and brisk, jaunty pop-rock spins-around-the-block.

The shifting scenery and changing pace kept the journey interesting, even if the four reserved young men in the band didn’t have the personality or communicative wherewithal to serve as engaging between-songs tour guides. At least Ride knew how to keep the engine revving with the well-tuned guitar duo of Andrew Bell and Mark Gardener set against drummer Loz Colbert’s Keith Moon-influenced bursts of percussion mania.

Ride’s latest album, “Going Blank Again,” emphasizes clean, concise song structures and bright hues--a significant departure from previous works that were denser, moodier and noisier. In concert, it made for a welcome diversity, rather than a discomfiting schizophrenia. The band’s popcraft is still developing, though, so its peak moments came on long, undulating trips that seemed to depart from the tumbling, churning psychedelia of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Despite a songbook loaded with post-adolescent melancholy, Ride tapped energy sources that enabled it to roll over fashionable mopery and its members’ own reticence in a strong, musically assertive performance.

Rookie English band Slowdive opened with a set of soothing, soporific wallowing that treated sadness as a delicacy. But the fashionable, lulled mopery--featuring Rachel Goswell’s nice, wistful soprano--tended to romanticize sadness rather than to probe it.