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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
Galaxie 500, comprised of
guitarist Dean Wareham, bassist Naomi Yang and and drummer Damon Krukowski,
went against the trend when they created an anti-theatrical style devoted
to urban alienation. Today (1988) was a moonlit tide of
languid litanies and whispered singalongs.
It was expressionism turned upside down: angst and terror, but in the form
of a bloodless stupor, not a loud scream. The trio played back
the third Velvet Underground album,
Pink Floyd's Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
and Television's Turn Curtain, but filtered of any residual vitality.
On Fire (1989), their most personal work, was an existential
anesthetic. There were echoes of the (acid-rock) past but they were ethereal,
sleepy, ghostly: they had been reduced to an inner language of the subconscious.
The setting was a wasteland roamed by zombies devoid of any passion,
resigned to their emotional impotence and moral isolation, capable only
of articulating the emptiness of their lives in a vocabulary of negative words.
These were confessions of people who did not even know anymore how to grieve for
their own sorrow. These dirges were the exact opposite of the anthemic call
to arms of rock'n'roll.
An excessive trance dazzled the acid jams of This Is Our Music (1990),
the most ambitious but also terminal leg of their "trip".
Parting ways with Wareham, the former rhythm section of Galaxie 500,
Yang and Krukowski assumed the moniker
Damon & Naomi (1) and recorded
More Sad Hits (1992), whose gentle breeze was the ideal appendix to
Galaxie 500's mission.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Galaxie 500 were fundamentally important in the history of rock for having sublimated the atmospheric and melancholic song, not from the poet’s perspective (like Leonard Cohen or Nick Drake), but from the perspective of the cultural humus of the 1980s, marked by street violence, drugs, and AIDS. Unsurprisingly, their music is rich in nostalgic overtones: it is nostalgia for an era of optimism that their generation never experienced. The languor of their music is the cataleptic state that replaced the anger of punk rock. It is a chronic neurosis that grips every domestic event. The only limitation of their music is that all their songs are essentially a repetition of the Velvet Underground’s third album.
Formed in Boston by three Harvard graduates—Naomi Yang (bass), Dean Wareham (guitar and vocals, from New Zealand), and Damon Krukowski (drums)—Galaxie 500 came to prominence with the single Tugboat (Aurora), a song that fit into the general climate of psychedelic revival but adopted an extremely subdued sound, the complete opposite of the frenzy of garage rock. Tugboat is essentially a litany sung without conviction or effort over a soft lyricism of slowly strummed melodic guitar chords while the drums maintain a hypnotic, almost raga-like cadence. That languid, idle, and “sidereal” style, the complete opposite of classic rock and roll, triumphs on Today (Aurora, 1988), produced by Kramer. Epoch-defining is especially the childlike nursery rhyme of Oblivious, which would remain their most famous melody, but more characteristic are a whisper-ballad like Flowers, a tender anthem like Temperature's Rising, the insanely cosmic and dreamlike atmosphere of It's Getting Late, the ecstatic harmony reminiscent of It's A Beautiful Day in Pictures, and the melodic folk-rock of Parking Lot; all compositions suspended in nothingness, acts of intense contemplation, triumphs of quiet and silence, testaments to a form of atheistic transcendence.
Here, the psychedelic whisper truly reveals its psychoanalytic significance, as the dual and opposite of the expressionist scream, equally terrifying but, precisely because it is contained, even more unnatural. These are songs made of quiet, slow-motion psychedelic explosions, of soft and glittering textures that mix the Pink Floyd of Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun with Television, but purifying both first of any residual aggressiveness.
Galaxie 500’s rock is anti-theatrical, the antithesis of showiness, which has always been rock’s ultimate raison d’être, and has as references equally subsonic groups like Opal and the Cowboy Junkies. The lyrics, dense with mundane details, address alienation quantitatively rather than qualitatively, not denouncing it but listing it. Those pessimistic and laconic verses form the portrait of an extremely fragile psyche, vibrating like a spiderweb in the wind.
On Fire (Rough Trade, 1989) increased, if anything, the sense of stasis, accentuates the languor of the interwoven guitars, and underscores the existentially anesthetic value that these ballads must hold for their authors. When listening to “famous” voices of the past, those voices are muffled in an anguish that is ever less shouted and ever more internalized: thus Blue Thunder follows the pace of Femme Fatale but is sprinkled with long “flights” of ethereal falsetto, and the melancholic lullaby of Strange evokes the most elegiac Neil Young; Leave The Planet is a solemn anthem reminiscent of Jefferson Airplane, and Plastic Bird is a folk-rock track with psychedelic chimes à la Country Joe.
The nocturnal quality of their music permeates all its soft lyricism in Another Day (sung by Yang), worthy of the most anemic Cowboy Junkies, and Decomposing Trees (jazz saxophone and nightclub haze). Wareham’s vocals are even more somnambulistic, and the guitar accompaniment is nothing more than a light caress in their finest melody, Tell Me (one of the pinnacles of their career). The limitation of this approach is Snowstorm, a shower of small impressionist touches, with the music stretched almost to vanishing, almost to a halt.
Despite the lethargic construction, the melodies on this album are stronger, although the total absence of pathos continues to weigh. The work even boasts the most masculine moment of their career: in the instrumental crescendo of the long jam When Will You Come Home (one of Dean Wareham’s best solos). Yet the “script” of these compositions remains unchanged: a scenario inhabited by abulic human figures, anti-romantic individuals incapable of passion, resigned to their moral isolation, only able to articulate the emptiness of their lives in a limited vocabulary of negative signs. These are the confessions of those who no longer even know how to weep over their own misfortunes. These songs are the exact opposite of a call to arms.
This Is Our Music (Rough Trade, 1990) is simultaneously the trio’s most ambitious and most unresolved album. At times, the group fails precisely because it has abandoned the humility of its early efforts. Galaxie 500 sound like heroin-puffed Feelies on Melt Away and verge on parodying the Velvet Underground in the boogie of Fourth Of July, with garage-style guitar tremolo. Although illuminated by the long trance of Summertime, the work lacks the strength to push beyond these mini acid-rock jams. Due to irreconcilable differences of opinion and temperament, the group disbands. Wareham would go on to form Luna, while Damon and Naomi would effectively continue the Galaxie 500 adventure. The albums were reissued in a CD box set 1987-1991 (Rykodisc, 1997), and shortly thereafter their only live album, Copenhagen (Rykodisc, 1997), was released.
After the EP Pierre Etoile, Damon and Naomi recorded the album More Sad Hits (Shimmy Disc, 1992 – SubPop, 1997) with the collaboration of Kramer. The album was released after Kramer had extensively reworked it in the studio, so the producer can effectively be considered a co-author of the music, and indeed the studio work outweighs spontaneity. The songs of these ’90s Sonny & Cher echo the sound of Galaxie 500, showing that Wareham was not the absolute master of the group; rather, Robert Wyatt, and the Canterbury scene in general (a Hugh Hopper cover proves it), emerge as the duo’s real point of reference. The music is therefore slightly softer and more dreamlike.
Yang’s high, pure register, fading into a celestial reverb, favors acoustic landscapes. Yang’s love-struck tone on Laika and the Ave Maria of E.T.A., with an almost Renaissance touch, accompanied only by Krukowski’s mechanical guitar strumming, leans toward a displaced folk, surreal fairy tales recited with a psychedelic diction, as in Little Red Record Co and especially This Car Climbed Mt Washington (already on the EP). Together they sing the romantic lullaby of Information Age and the psychedelic psalm of Once More, and one can truly imagine Sonny & Cher resurrected in the noise-pop era.
Meanwhile, Yang and Krukowski also formed Magic Hour with guitarist Wayne Rogers. More humble, less ethereal, and more folk-oriented, The Wondrous World (SubPop, 1995) is highlighted by tracks like New York City, Pyewacket, and Whispering. The band nonetheless leaves an important legacy: a new way of expressing alienation through rock music, and perhaps even the musical expression of a new form of alienation. Their desolate moral landscape has nothing in common with that of the Velvet Underground, but it is no less unsettling. Songs like Tugboat, Oblivious, Parking Lot, Tell Me, Another Day, and Strange explore a milieu in which emotions no longer exist, only vague states of mind.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Having lost Kramer, Playback Singers (Subpop, 1998) is truly a duo album.
Turn Of The Century and Eye Of The Storm show more personality
precisely because they carry less harmonic baggage.
The desolate and phylosophical We're Not There sums up the depressed
mood, but Krukowski's acoustic guitar has acquired a mystical tone reminescent
of Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra and the tunes share a pastoral
simplicity with Magnetic Fields
and Belle And Sebastian.
And Yang has become one of the most creative bassists of her time.
But only a few of the songs are signed by the duo and only a few of those
are truly outstanding.
The duo's next step is
With Ghost (Subpop, 2000), a collaboration with the Japanese band
Ghost.
Damon & Naomi sound like Sonny & Cher backed by the Beach Boys on
The Mirror Phase
and
Krukowski's stately Judah And The Maccabees resembles a
version of Kocking On Heaven's Door sung by a somnambulant Bob Dylan.
The gospel-rock of I Dreamed Of The Caucasus brings back to mind the
later Jefferson Airplane.
But then Masaki Batoh pens the baroque madrigal The New World,
and, by the time Yang's gregorian contralto ventures on
the lengthy hymn The Great Wall,
the album has embraced
Popol Vuh and Dead Can Dance.
Nirvana is approached through dilated songs that are intense meditations.
Batoh's and Krukowski's guitars indulge in the acousting doodling of
Don't Forget.
Quiet guitar and piano strumming and floating vocals fill the first part of
Tanka with a sense of ecstasy and wonder.
The Japanese trio forms the perfect backing for the two American intellectuals
and gives their music a supernatural dimension.
Ghost helped Damon & Naomi reinvent themselves.
This dream-pop excursion crowns the duo's 12-year research on moody music.
Song To The Siren (Sub Pop, 2002) documents a live performance with
Ghost's guitarist Michio Kurihara.
Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste: 1987-1991 is a double-DVD retrospective.
Uncollected (RykoDisc, 2004) collects rarities.
The Earth Is Blue (20/20/20, 2005), featuring Ghost's
guitarist Michio Kurihara, is their least substantial work.
The songs are trivial, the sound is trite and amateurish, the singing is
lifeless.
Damon and Naomi managed to create a paradox with
Within These Walls (20/20/20, 2007), an album of easy-listening muzak
featuring contributions of some outstanding avantgarde musicians
(Ghost's Michio Kurihara, Espers' cellist Helena Espvall,
Nmperign's saxophonist Bhob Rainey).
False Beats and True Hearts (2011) is sometimes more instrumental than
vocal, perhaps an implicit confession that the duo does not have much left to
say, and perhaps never had. They invented their own form of background
"ambient" music, and the specific songs don't really matter. Ophelia
is perhaps mildly more relevant in their own closed universe.
The notable exception, however, is the poppy Walking Backwards,
their attempt at going mainstream.
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