Galaxie 500 were once lumped in with many of the shoegazing outfits currently hopping on the
revival bandwagon. But their reissued albums show they were heartbreakingly apart, writes Alexis
Petridis
If you came of musical majority as the 80s bled into the 90s, if your age means you can remember
when a chart placing of 38 and Snub TV showing a homemade video represented a dizzying peak of
mainstream acceptance that an indie band could scarcely dare to dream about, then recent events
in rock may have left you feeling discombobulated. First, virtually every alt-rock band from that
era reformed. It was all profoundly odd, like waking up one morning to discover that everyone
you'd copped off with in your teens had assembled in your front garden and started batting their
eyelashes at you. But it comes to us all: eventually, almost everyone reaches an age at which the
music industry starts trying to divest you of cash in exchange for a wallow in your youthful
memories, whether those memories involve Freddie and the Dreamers or the Butthole Surfers' Locust
Abortion Technician.
What happened next was more surprising. New artists started emerging who sounded exactly like the
late thirtysomething's youthful memories: not, it has to be said, something your Freddie And The
Dreamers fan ever had to cope with. Indie dance is back, so is Balearic music, there's talk of a
grunge revival, and you can't move for shoegazing, albeit under the guise of chillwave, a title
arrived at after a lengthy, quarrelsome but ultimately successful meeting called to devise an
even worse name for a genre than shoegazing. Then there's the Drums, who have become a hotly
tipped NME band while modelling themselves on Sarah Records shamblers the Field Mice, a state of
affairs that would have seemed extraordinary and hilarious in 1989, somewhat akin to becoming
Knightbridge professor of philosophy at Cambridge while modelling yourself on Vinnie Jones.
It all makes the reissue of the three albums US trio Galaxie 500 released before splitting
acrimoniously in 1991 perversely timely: heard 20 years on, Today, On Fire and This Is Our Music
prove not every aspect of that era's indie rock as been stripmined in recent years. No one is
currently offering Galaxie 500's melange of trebly guitar, serpentine basslines, fragile vocals
and oddly jazz-inflected drumming (This Is Our Music borrowed its title from Ornette Coleman).
Certainly, no one currently sounds like singer Dean Wareham. Listening to his high voice floating
wildly off-key in a way that simply wouldn't be allowed these days for fear of upsetting daytime
radio play, you're reminded of a vanished age before Auto-Tune, when alt-rock's aims and
ambitions and audience were noticeably different.
That said, no one really sounded like Galaxie 500 at the time. If they didn't appear as
bafflingly other as their contemporaries Pixies – who, with their Spanish
lyrics, biblical references and bass player who billed herself as Mrs John Murphy, gave every
impression of having arrived on the British indie scene in a UFO – they still
seemed alien compared to their peers. For one thing, all three had been educated at Harvard:
after the band split, drummer Damon Krukowski and bass player Naomi Yang started a publishing
house specialising in reprinting experimental literature by, among others, Artaud, Apollinaire,
and Gertrude Stein, not a career path Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers was ever likely to
take. For another, their influences were different from the norm. Like every indie band before or
since, they were in thrall to the Velvet Underground; but not the black-clad, feedback-riven John
Cale Velvets, upon whose ouevre the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and the umpteen
bands that followed in their wake were founded. Instead, they drew on the hushed, introverted
sound of the Velvets' eponymous 1969 album. They were clearly Beatles obsessives
– not that common a reference point in late 80s alt-rock –
and their cover versions suggested an infinitely more intriguing and tangential approach to the
Fabs oeuvre than the endless rewriting of Hey Jude and Tomorrow Never Knows that became Britpop's
lingua franca: George Harrison's Isn't It a Pity?; Yoko Ono's Listen Snow Is Falling; a
surprisingly wracked-sounding version of the Rutles' Cheese and Onions.
"Come ride the fiery breeze of Galaxie 500!" implored one of their sleevenotes, and that's how
their records sounded: simultaneously hushed and sweltering, as if they were recorded at the dead
of a summer's night. The reverb that invariably swathed their spare arrangements meant they were
lumped in with the shoegazers, but while shoegazing indulged in the rather adolescent practice of
amping up vague emotions until they assumed mammoth importance – if they had
enough effects pedals, they could make feeling a bit sad sound like a matter of earth-shattering
importance – Galaxie 500 did the opposite. There was something stark and
understated about their sound, which pointed up both their talent for an effortlessly simple
melody – Today in particular abounds with them – and their
keen ear for affecting lyrical detail. "I'm listening to the weather, and he's changed his tone
of voice," sang Wareham on Snowstorm. "The TV's going wild, they've got nothing else to think
of," he adds, to which anyone who endured interminable news footage of abandoned cars and
sledging children during the recent big freeze can only add: yeah, tell me about it.
They didn't really change or develop their sonic blueprint so much as hone it: the odd overdubbed
acoustic guitar notwithstanding, there's not much to set 1991's This Is Our Music apart from
their debut. Maybe it was better they broke up when they did, before diminishing returns set in
(the three extra CDs here don't add much to the legend, a deeply improbable Peel Session cover of
the Sex Pistols' Submission aside, suggesting Galaxie 500 did all they had to do on their three
official albums).
As it is, the simplicity of those three albums still cuts through – their
cover of Jonathan Richman's Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste stretches one chord out for nearly
seven minutes, but the result is heartbreaking rather than numbing. And it still sounds unique,
even in the current climate: testament to the fact that the past can still be a foreign country,
no matter how many people seem intent on emigrating there.
Rating: 5/5
Alexis Petridisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use
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