BUZZ BANDS

His next ride

has arrived

You aren’t who you were in 1992. Mark Gardener thinks you shouldn’t expect him to be, either.

Gardener, one of the driving forces behind the influential British quartet Ride, next week releases his solo debut “These Beautiful Ghosts,” his first album since Ride disbanded in 1996. The album’s jangly psych-pop sounds a lot closer to Gram Parsons than it does My Bloody Valentine or the other shoegazers (so named for the players’ penchant for looking at the foot pedals that controlled their guitar effects) with whom Gardener made his mark.

“I’d be uncomfortable trying to do anything resembling Ride -- but there were songs underneath all that chaos and I love playing them,” Gardener says from a stop on a tour that Saturday night hits the Fonda Theatre (he opens for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club).

The new material, some of it incubated in the early ‘00s when he was living in the French countryside, was the result of “giving myself a chance to be in a zone where I don’t feel any pressure, from labels, from financial difficulties, from anything.... It’s what feels natural to me now.”

Gardener acknowledges being energized from having fallen in with a group of young collaborators, including an alt-country quintet from his native Oxford, Goldrush (more on them later this month), New York singer-songwriter Cat Martino and Danny Black of L.A.’s September Gurls.

All rotate in and out of Gardener’s live band and were forces, either as performers or co-writers, on the album.

“There are a lot of weird connections involving people you don’t even live in the same town with, but it happened very naturally,” Gardener says, noting the common ground: “You sit around strumming and playing songs with people.”

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Fast forward

American Eyes’ bash for its EP “Never Trust Anything That Bleeds” is Tuesday night at the Key Club.... Silverlake Lounge residents this month: the Words on Mondays and Sabrosa Purr on Wednesdays.... Wanted to mention: Props to Luther Russell and band for their set last month at the Viper Room.... Techno dance-punk trio Bedtime for Toys plugs in every Wednesday at Club Moscow at Boardner’s.

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-- Kevin Bronson