From the Vaults Friday: Galaxie 500, On Fire (1989)

The Year: 1989
The Album: Galaxie 500, On Fire
Who It Influenced: Low, The Clientele, British Sea Power, Beach House, Xiu Xiu, Deerhunter/Atlas Sound

This week, indie legends Galaxie 500 announced their three magnificent, magical albums —1988's Today, 1989's On Fire, and 1990's This Is Our Music— were being fancily reissued (for the first time ever!) at the newly-established Galaxie 500 web-store.

One of the great cult acts in alternative music history, Galaxie 500 were only around for four years, but crafted a perfectly self-contained discography of near-perfect albums. All recorded by producer/svengali/bong-enthusiast Kramer, the albums find the trio tentatively stepping through a sweet, swirling, psychedelic haze; a melancholy pop-band lost in a daydreamy sound steeped in the Modern Lovers, Velvet Underground, Television, and The Feelies.

In his refreshingly frank memoir, Black Postcards, Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham, in a punk-rock way, peels away the mythologies of music-making, and revels in its mundanities. Knowing, then, that Wareham wrote lyrics whilst watching Kojak, or about a Star Trek episode, or about a bad house-party the band was dragged to should, then, make Galaxie 500's music seem less mysterious, less wondrous, less otherworldly.

But listening to On Fire is a special experience; one that circumvents those parts of your mind. Every time I hear the band slip into "Decomposing Trees" —Naomi Yang's bass warm like a hug, Wareham's guitar milling like clouds, his voice falling like a sullen, lazy rainshower— it's vivid and evocative; music that drowns the dreary narrative of conscious thought in tumbles of emotion and swirls of kaleidoscopic visions.

• Full review: Galaxie 500, On Fire
• Interview: Dean Wareham