Galaxie 500 Today / On Fire / This Is Our Music (Domino)
4/5
By: Matt Tomiak
These three re-issues of rough-hewn yet beguiling dream-pop from the New York boy/boy/girl trio provide for some intriguing listening a couple of decades after their initial release. Singer Dean Wareham could barely hold a tune but delivered lines like his life depended on it, paving the way for atonal but passionate cult indie heroes from Jeff Mangum to Darren Hayman.
Today (1988) is an unsettling debut, defined by a creepy cover of Jonathan Richman's ‘Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste. ' It also contained the rudimentary-yet-ace, should-have-been student anthem ‘Oblivious’, a tune as charming and unsophisticated as its title suggests ("I'd rather stay in bed with you/till it's time to get a drink…")
1989 sophomore On Fire is the best of the lot, featuring the queasy, hippy-dream-gone-sour 'Decomposing Trees' which comes on like Neil Young doing Arthur Lee, the echoes within 'When Will You Come Home' of the whiny neurosis of the Violent Femmes, as well as the band tackling New Order's 'Ceremony' in typically anesthetized fashion.
The solipsistic lyrical themes that would come to define shoegaze in the UK feature on This Is Our Music (1990) as evidenced by Wareham’s lazy drawl on 'Fourth of July' (“And I pulled the shades so I didn't have to see the sky/ and I decided to have a Bed In/ But I forgot to invite anybody.”).
Artists in this article: Galaxie 500
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