Galaxie 500

Next to the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything, On Fire ensured that the 1980s would end in a flurry of incredible music. Galaxie's sophomore album was shambling psychedelia at its finest: the Byrds filtered through the Velvets, with crawling tempos that verged on spiritual.

Ten stark songs distinguished by a downbeat grace, On Fire offers a new wrinkle in
American guitar rock: Where most bands gallop, Galaxie 500's slow, slow songs remind you
that momentum is a function of mass as well as velocity. Dean Wareham's disembodied,
echoing voice drifts tantalizingly among the music's yawning spaces; it's quite a trick to
bury vocals in such minimal bass-drums-guitar arrangements. The music is often... More >

Who needs world-beat when indie darlings might as well be singing in Tagalog? I don't mean the words are physically or even semantically incomprehensible, either. Twinkies and decomposing trees and staring at the wall do break through the fog; motivated, I could probably construct a lyric sheet. But just like Lisandro Meza or Chaba Fadela, only not as well, what they produce for the curious outsider is a sound--halting, folk-psychedelic guitar signatures that establish each song's atmosphere. With George Harrison's "Isn't it a pity" the measure of their wisdom, verbal motivation isn't on the agenda. (Grade - B)