A Head Full of Wishes

A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.

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A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #45

My record collection [333] Galaxie 500 - This Is Our Music / Copenhagen (2xCD)

This is the third and last of the lovely double CD editions released by Domino Records in 2010 and like the previous two it has a lovely glossy booklet with an essay and some pictures and the Byron Coley piece that was used on all three releases.

Galaxie 500 - This Is Our Music / Copenhagen
Galaxie 500 - This Is Our Music / Copenhagen

The essay for This Is Our Music was by British music journalist Chris Roberts:

As Oscar Wilde once said, among many lovably smart-ass things he said, “He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.” Galaxie 500 purred at a time when others were shouting. Things were different then. “Indie” or “alternative” music really was a minority taste, and a different colour and texture to the music flooding the mainstream. This was their music. “Slowcore,” “dream pop,” call it what you will, it was sleepy yet somehow buzzing. Cool, yet somehow trembling with anticipation. Laid-back, yet brimming with the minute emotions and implosions of the everyday inner life.

So they stole the title, from a 1960 Ornette Coleman masterpiece. A successful heist is all about the attitude. Galaxie 500, named after a car, never raced. They let the world, or the more discerning components, come to them. They met in New York, improved at Harvard University, and became known as a Boston band. It was to be, as nobody had predicted, a golden age for Boston bands. With Kramer producing alchemically, they made Today and On Fire, drowned in rave reviews (at least in the UK), found themselves compared to the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman and New Order. This Is Our Music, the third album, came in 1991, after Dean Wareham had moved back to New York. After much touring, he left the trio, whose last European show was released as a swansong live album, Copenhagen. See if you can guess in which Danish city that took place.

The members of Galaxie 500 went on to do further stirring and lovely things in music afterwards, but their legacy had already begun. The influence of these sounds spans far and wide to this day. It’s about restraint, delay, poise. Galaxie 500 records are as rough as sandpaper yet as elegant as jewellery. There’s a happy, maybe lucky blend between Dean’s so-wrong-yet-so-right voice and his deceptively brilliant guitar, between Damon’s minimal yet mesmerising rhythms and Naomi’s loping, groping bass. They’re gentle yet diamond-hard, sweet yet capable of savagery.

From the opening intro drone of the exquisite ‘Fourth Of July,’ This Is Our Music asserts its sparkle and self-sufficiency. There are ebbs and flows within every Galaxie 500 track and the magic is that you can never quite pin down the moments when a surge begins, when a retreat occurs. We’re hearing shards and trills of Verlaine-esque guitars, a pace stately yet seductive. We’re writing “a poem on a dog biscuit,” evidently, and even if the dog refuses to look at it, we’re hooked on a mystery. We’re getting drunk and looking at the Empire State Building, which is “no bigger than a nickel.” It’s evocative, a fresh twist on classic Manhattan lore, and for we Brits that makes for a head-full of Warhol imagery, from Edie to Lou, from grids to rooftops. There’s a lazy, languid air of almost accidental romance. “Maybe I should just change my style/But I feel all right when you smile...” Their music is both relaxed and relentless.

There are echoes, psalms, clinches. On the centrepiece, ‘Summertime,’ they are “just delicious.” How this track builds and falls and builds again. It’s a sea, a shapeshifter. There’s a kind of brittle faith and hope in Naomi’s vocal on Yoko Ono’s ‘Listen, The Snow Is Falling.’ On ‘Melt Away’ we warm our hands on a glow. ‘King Of Spain, Part Two’ brings us around and tells us all good things are timeless.

This Is Our Music was out of time and in its zone and so now sounds as timeless as birth and death and beauty. It’s just three people with guitars and bass and drums, going “doo doo doo wah.” This is deferred gratification.

Chris Roberts - This Is Our Music liner notes

So we reach the tenth and last (for now) copy of Galaxie 500’s last album in this series (not counting the two copies in the box sets). As I said before don’t believe anyone who says this is a weak album, don’t believe Dean, and don’t believe Kramer.

Previously in my record collection:

My record collection [334] Luna - Inside Your Heart (lathe cut single)

Inside Your Heart was recorded by Luna in the sessions for A Sentimental Education and originally released as a bonus download with the Pledgemusic release of that album. This single was released a couple of years later by PIAPTK.

Luna - Inside Your Heart
Luna - Inside Your Heart

The single is a cover of a song by The Monochrome Set and is another example of Dean digging deep for his choice of covers - the song only really surfaced in 2010 on an LP of early recordings, and possibly dates from before they were actually called The Monochrome Set. Here’s a clip of them playing it in London last year:

The Monochrome Set - Inside Your Heart (London, 2025) (play on YouTube)

Now, I love an artefact, particularly a beautiful artefact and it can’t be denied that this single is a beautiful artefact. It’s a single hand-cut into a plastic disc which, when spun in the correct lighting conditions, shows lovely and hypnotic patterns…

Luna - Inside Your Heart spinning (15 secs) (play on YouTube)

However… this is written on a PIATPK insert with the single:

Please note that this lathe cut record was made one-at-a-time, in real-time, by a real person, from plexiglass using an experimental process and 70 year old machines. It is NOT a pressed record and may have slightly more surface noise or an occasional light distortion in some frequencies, and will sound somewhat different than the original master. The volume will also be a little lower than a modern "post-loudness-war" record, so pump up the volume. It won't be audiophile, but it ought to be listenable and sound pretty good considering the circumstances of its' birth. It might also require tonearm and anti-skate adjustment in order to track correctly due to the hard plastic having slightly shallower grooves than a traditional record.

Which does raise the question of whether something that doesn’t perform its primary function well is really something that is sensible to produce? Unless of course its primary function is to look beautiful? They also obviously cost much more to produce and so they end up costing the fan a lot of money for a one track single that doesn’t sound that great.

To be honest I think my love of “the artefact” wins over the “primary function” argument - although it does help that Dean was kind enough to send me a copy for nothing!

It also helps that for a fiver you can buy a digital release of Inside Your Heart and five other post-reunuion rarities in high quality so, the artefact can be a visual treat while you listen to the song the way it should sound!

While Luna were making A Sentimental Education they released a number of videos as part of the “campaign” including a clip of them in the studio recording Inside Your Heart:

Luna - recording Inside Your Heart (play on YouTube)

Discoveries and rediscoveries

https://aheadfullofwishes.substack.com/p/the-galaxie-500-mailing-list-slight

  • This week in 1991, 35 years ago, Galaxie 500 set out on what turned out to be their last tour, playing large halls around the US supporting The Cocteau Twins - and things were cracking! On the 18th March they arrived at The Crawford Hall in Irvine…
During the Los Angeles show on our last tour, Dean (who almost never moved during our shows) suddenly stepped downstage front and center during a guitar solo, and a white spotlight materialized, focused directly on him. Apparently this had been arranged with the sound and lighting people beforehand. Nothing, but nothing, like that had ever been done at a Galaxie 500 show, and it completely freaked me out...

Damon Krukowski - Ptolemaic Terrascope, 1997

I remember the night a little differently [...] Anyway, it is true that I stepped downstage front and center during a guitar solo. We were playing theatres and small college arenas -- larger stages than we were used to -- and I felt a little awkward out there, standing in place in the triangle that was formed by bass, drums, and guitar, At any rate, the singer is generally allowed to stray from the mocrophone stand.

The lighting director (probably an employee of the Cocteau Twins', but not someone I had ever spoken a word to) turned a spotlight on me. Why Damon thought that this came about because of a secret deal I had made, I don't know.

Dean Wareham - Black Postcards, 2008

This coming week in the past

16th March 2023 - Dean Wareham in London

This was the show that I felt crap at and is the only time I’ve ever left a Dean gig before it ended… went back to the hotel and shivered myself to sleep. I did however see the soundcheck, and most of the show. Here they are playing Galaxie 500’s When Will You Come Home during the soundcheck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkPtfRUh7DI