The effect of Galaxie 500's music is akin to that of a lit match in an empty, darkened room. Their style of ambient rock is so uniquely visceral and assuredly sovereign that the band are near impossible to place in context. They're better than context, at once barrenly isolated and cozily insulated. They radiate light when there's nothing to illuminate. One can picture them performing alone on an infinite plane, casting lambent guitar peals into the abyss as the bass throws off cool purple embers. It's uncanny how a band could create such imagistic soundscapes using just guitar, bass and drums, but their method was deceptively simple: Recording elementary pop songs at slothful tempos, Galaxie 500 voided the outside world simply by using reverb-- lots of it-- to make their songs hugely, panoptically immersive. Their indolent compositions are at once keenly prescient of the slacker rock of the early 1990s, and beholden strictly unto themselves.
Indeed, in literal terms, the band were, in some ways, all by themselves. Operating during what was arguably a latent period for underground music, the group were unparalleled in style and substance. Oddly enough, they came to typify late-80s college rock, right alongside their Boston brethren the Pixies. But Galaxie 500 were always markedly set apart from their peers, enjoying (one imagines) the sort of critical insulation brought by a timeless sound and largely posthumous discovery. This confluence of circumstances, combined with some of a decade's most killer riffs, has won the band comparisons to The Velvet Underground. But as with the Velvets, to saddle Galaxie 500 with generous comparisons is unnecessary, and only serves to diminish their rare achievements, and undercut the singular impact they've wrought upon independent music.
Though 1989's On Fire remains their finest and most fully realized album, uninitiated fans seeking to begin an affair with this group would be well advised to seek out three tracks from Uncollected, a document of the band's rarest works that was first issued as part of Rykodisc's four-disc Galaxie 500 box set, and has now been issued as a standalone release. "Walking Song", and the two subsequent tracks, comprise the band's 1987 demo tape; they aren't the highlights of this set (much less the band's entire catalog), but they are significant, because they illustrate, more vividly than any other selections I can think of, the group's rapid learning period and concomitant progression toward one of the most distinctive sounds in indie rock's storied history. In just five years, the trio went from being a slack post-grad pub band with minimal playing experience and a dilettante bassist, to progenitors of dream-pop and one of the underground's most folkloric and influential acts.
Many of these tracks exist outside this collection, among various odds-and-sods EPs and compilations. The non-album version of "Blue Thunder", pilfered from the 1989 Rough Trade EP of the same name, features a yowling saxophone, and, despite the stridency of its accompaniment, is somehow even more sobering than the album cut. Tender and quavering originally, Ralph Carney's tenor sax stands up to the woebegone guitar and chilly vocals, providing firmness in the face of heady melancholy. The contrast only broadens the already immense emotional breadth of the song, making it not just one of the most moving songs here, but anywhere in the band's repertoire.
A guitar band first and foremost, Galaxie 500 also displayed a scholarly and eclectic penchant for covers, and Uncollected gathers a handful of these impressions among 11 original works, including a slowcore read of The Rutles' "Cheese & Onions" and an august live suite showcasing The Beatles' "Rain" and Jonathan Richman's "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste". Suffused with piecemeal effects and lush string swells, "Cheese & Onions" is more histrionic than the band's traditional understated material, and serves as a stellar example of their musicological reach. The nearly-nine-minute live suite, however, is quintessential Galaxie, showing all shades of the group, from ragtag pop troubadours, to cogitating slowcore shamans, to towering guitar rock demigods. Dean Wareham's lavishly reverbed solo at the end of "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste" is one of his most formidable; that it was performed live is a testament to his well-earned, yet still largely unrecognized, place in the guitar-god pantheon.
While many of these tracks remain true to the band's staple sound, the most interesting cuts are those that witness them taking a different, often slightly exploratory bent. "Oblivious" shows a bouncier Galaxie 500, sacrificing ambience for a blither interest in straightforward hooks, while "Song in 3" stakes a tumbling inverted waltz that smacks more directly of the band's relationship with 60s pop. Elsewhere, "Walking Song" is perhaps the most upbeat example of the group's songwriting, honoring its title with a propulsive drumbeat and surf-like breakdown. The songs most redolent of the band's album cuts-- the jittery "Them", "Summertime"-in-uteri "Final Day", and the drowsy "Maracas Song"-- are undoubtedly strong ones, but nevertheless provide somewhat pallid stand-ins for classics like "Fourth of July", "When Will You Come Home", or "Listen, The Snow Is Falling". These aren't Galaxie 500's best songs, but-- whether covers or not-- they are unmistakably their songs, which makes this release an invaluable artifact for devout fans, and a strong selling point for tyros.
