If this album doesn’t make teenage girls everywhere want to steal their older brother’s guitar, learn a few power chords and start a band with a couple of friends in their parents’ front room, there’s clearly something very wrong with the youth of today.
An album as classic as its faultless Thelma & Louise-ian artwork, the universal themes of ‘Ride Your Heart’ manage to transcend the dated California girl stereotype while knowingly plugging into what still makes the myth so appealing.
These songs are catchy in a way that might not surprise you, but the different twists they take, and the different ways they poke at rock tradition, and our expectations of women within that tradition, are fascinating.
Hooky garage tracks crackle underneath a heart that beats steady, only occasionally arrhythmic.
Though there's an electric current coursing through Ride Your Heart, it's too often wasted on mundane material-- which is especially disappointing given how zany and lyrically imaginative their previous band was.
Ride Your Heart is a near perfect exemplification of everything those who own those early singles thought that Bleached could be.
Perhaps this a record that works better under the summer sun, but right now 'Ride Your Heart' doesn’t sound much more than a showcase for surfy style and lo-fi charm.
Bleached have discovered that they have a canny knack for inoffensive rhythms, melodies and harmonies which will immediately appeal. But where this record needed to provide an abrasive counterpoint in the lyrics, they’re more sickly sweet than the music.