Galaxie 500
This Is Our Music

THE REVIEW

Still stunned from listening to an Animal Collective album, I felt the need to warm my soul with something intimate, simple, and approachable. My eye falls on Prazision by Labradford. But no. Then I see This Heat's self-titled album. I really don't think so. I start to hear a little voice in my head singing: "When you went blind And I nearly lost my mind It didn't last Cause you have another eyeliiiiiiiiiiid". But of course, how could I not think of it sooner? The answer was "This Is Our Music". This is our music. A moving title in its simplicity and straightforwardness. It's like saying, "We're not geniuses, we do what we can. But we try to do it in the best way possible. Hope you like it." Of course we like you, you're wonderful. Humble and beautiful. Oh my, the stony-hearted cynics might say they play the same song throughout the whole album. In part, they might be right, and it's precisely for this reason that I feel like praising them, because despite that, the emotional tension is always high. And personally, that’s what matters.

The Galaxie 500 seem to me to be the archetype of the unfortunate band. They are born and few notice. They release three studio albums, break up, each goes their own way, and no one notices. A destiny that sees them in the memories of a few unlucky souls. But this only makes them terribly charming in my eyes. Not three guys who played melancholy, but three guys who fed on melancholy. Languid melancholy, which they then had to expel in their works to avoid imploding from existential tedium. Perhaps with their minds constantly reaching towards what could have been and then wasn’t, who knows. Apart from the legacy of Cohen and Drake, their debt to the lesser-known Velvet Underground is obvious, just recall a "Jesus" or a "Candy Says" to notice it. And just refer to a "Here She Comes Now" (and compare it with the cover of the same you will find here) or a "Lady Godiva's Operation" to notice that the paranoid and neurotic aspect of Reed's band is almost entirely missing in the languid Galaxies. A description of the individual tracks would be futile; the band’s mood is the same throughout the work. Perhaps only Fourth of July, the track that opens the nostalgic dances, tries to render the atmosphere more "playful" (apologies to Wareham and ex-associates), with that tender initial guitar gallop that almost struggles to chase the ghosts of a past that doesn’t want to go away. Or maybe it tries to drive away those that it already sees looming in the immediate future. It's enough to know that listening to this album is a bit like cutting your throat with a honey-soaked knife.

Three guys with little ambition, moderately loved, highly moving.

Dear Animal Collective, maybe next time. Or in the next life.