This Is Our Music

By their final studio album, Galaxie 500 had honed their strengths to a fine point. Throughout their brief career together, lead singer and guitarist Dean Wareham, bassist Naomi Yang and drummer Damon Krukowski channelled influences from post-punk bands such as New Order and The Cure and left-field progenitors like the Velvet Underground into music that sounded strikingly original. This Is Our Music served as a summation, but also found them pushing into new territory while foreshadowing projects that would come after the band.
These songs show the beauty of repetition and the poetry of the right guitar tone, but they also affirm the growing maturity of the group’s songwriting. Wareham’s lyrics on the half-spoken opener, “Fourth of July”, are especially sardonic (and point to the style he’d develop further in his next band, Luna), detailing life as a lonely New Yorker on holiday who can’t catch a break, while the song's chorus, a surging injection of melody, is among the band’s best. “Summertime” unfolds at a snail's pace, setting the template for the indie-rock subgenre that would be called slowcore as it lingers over each chiming guitar chord and wash of cymbals. Mark Kramer adds colours to the Galaxie 500 palette, playing flute on “Way Up High” and synthetic strings on “Spook”, and his sympathetic production, which bathes the thundering swirl of guitar and percussion in reverb, takes each song into the realm of dreamy psychedelia. The perfectly chosen cover song was an important part of the Galaxie 500 story, and here, their take on Yoko Ono's “Listen, the Snow Is Falling”, featuring a rare lead vocal from Yang—who would later join Krukowski in Damon & Naomi—is the last of them on record. The Galaxie 500 arc was small, spanning barely five years, but they made the most of their time as a unit, and This Is Our Music was an affecting final chapter.