Galaxie 500 - On Fire (Rykodisc)

They were the non-Pixies. By which I mean to say that Galaxie 500 and the Pixies are divided as much by what they shared in common as they are unified by that which made them such distinct propositions. Both bands came together in Boston in 1986, and both featured laconic visionaries in the lead guitar / vocals chair, both also hailing from foreign climes: in the case of Galaxie 500's (and later Luna's) Dean Wareham, New Zealand; for Black Francis Black, the no less antipodal (culturally speaking) Southern California. Both bands were also gender-integrated, with a "chick bassist" -- Naomi Yang and Kim Deal -- who, while not conventionally hot, sported unconventional looks that meant that, no matter where she stood on stage and regardless of how much of her raven hair covered her faces, she was always intriguing. And both groups have had a tremendous influence on what has since become "alternative rock", even though both began as simple little college bands. Formed by students, each band catered to a similar youth audience: Reagan-era smart-asses and slummers discovering the bleak joys of garage rock, the Beckett-esque pronouncement, poseur-ism, and cheap, strychnine-heavy acid tabs. But where The Pixies' shoulda-been hits were cranked-up, all deflecting irony and searing flash, Galaxie 500 specialized in a narcotized lyricism, were into swell, scatter and soar; their "heaviness" was the cumulative effect of ample reverb and high volume, and of feeling suffused. Otherwise, the trio actually would have been what a British interviewer (see the Plexifilm Galaxie 500 1987 -1991 DVD) rather scurrilously reported some people had said they were anyway: "wimpy".

Nowhere is the peculiar tension Galaxie 500 could establish -- assuming that verb makes any sense vis-à-vis tension -- more apparent than on their sophomore album, On Fire, from 1989. True, there are few moments in all the brief history of shoe-gazing as glorious as when Wareham's guitar cuts through the pastel murk of "Flowers", the very first track on Galaxie's very first album (Today). True, too, that their last record, 1990's This Is Our Music contains the band's most sophisticated work, both in terms of song-craft and actual performance. But On Fire stands up best as a coherent artistic (arty?) statement. The noise -- primarily guitar feedback, but also saxophone (courtesy Ralph Carney), shaken and stroked percussion, and the muted howl of backing vocals -- is more chromatic here, the echo more expansive, the pop fizzier, the psychedelia sillier yet also less cloying (cf., "Leave The Planet", which also incorporates "Love Me Do"-style harmonica, as if the band were confused about which Beatles they want to pay tribute to), the evanescence, as on the follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-along "Another Day", more immutable, the cheerlessness more honeyed, the sensuality starker, and the emotional denial seems as if it is being put under pressure in some even further recess. Take "When Will You Come Home", which seems to start out as a jangle-ballad but ends as a seething freak-out. Has the song's protagonist tired of waiting and "watching TV all alone" and finally gone out of his apartment to search for his erstwhile love? Or is he just spinning mad, frustrated circles in his ennui? "Snowstorm", On Fire's other epic track, is pure "first winter in the big city" impressionism, with wah-wah guitar simulating the waft and impact of fat, moist flakes. And here, as elsewhere, Wareham's observational lyrics are so mundane (but not gritty, i.e., with the cockroaches in plain view) they become oblique, then so oblique they swirl into the uncanny. In this respect, "Strange" and especially "Plastic Bird" represent the twin apotheoses of Galaxie 500's music. The music is so big, nearly anthemic, but the sentiments as intoned are so small -- petty, even. The complete lyrics to "Plastic Bird": "And when I left your place / Gave me a plastic bird / You won it at the festival / Well I pulled both legs off / And then I smashed its nose / And left it on First Avenue".

Coupled with Yang's imperturbably melodic bass lines and Damon Krukowski's asymmetrical pitter-patter thrash, and the results are stirring, but not immediately, as though one were burning up in the core of a time lag, or spinning down in the comet tail of super slo-mo. Of course, it is conceivable that I'm just too close to similar personal experiences. I've been through those break-ups during which personal effects which might otherwise be trivial are invested with great emotional significance only so they can be flung over fences, backed over, burned, trod upon, or rent in two with a mighty scream. Yet I think my admiration has much more to do with the collision of scales, maxi and mini, in Galaxie 500's music. The plaintiveness of their best songs is so intense that you can only do justice to what it means to listen to them by calling them "hallucinatory." Together, Krukowski, Wareham and Yang were gracefully stoned entity. Only not literally. They were actually high on emotion: stunned by the ordinariness of their own feelings and the ease with which those feelings reach escape velocity. Hardly ever before and certainly never since has the poetry of the humble "Whoosh!" been probed so fruitfully, or with such undaunted aching.

~ Joe Milazzo