‘It’s unfair to ask once-precious music to retain its life-or-death significance after two decades,’ asserts David Cavanagh in his re-assessment of Galaxie 500’s three studio albums, due for imminent rerelease by Domino Records. While I have some sympathy for this notion, in the case of Galaxie 500, he is simply wrong. All three of these albums resonate just as intensely as they did when they were first recorded.

Twenty years ago they sounded like no-one else; now, the whole dream-pop movement – Grizzly Bear, Here We Go Magic, Papercuts, Beach House – is built on the blueprint laid down by the New York trio.

It’s easy to forgot how unique Today, the band’s debut, was at the time of its release. Viewed in the context of the two albums which followed it’s tempting to see it as merely a signpost of what was to come. Listening to the cover of Jonathan Richman’s Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste is the best way to disabuse yourself of that idea. Nobody else in the late 1980s made music even remotely like this.

By the time the band released On Fire, the sound had changed. It was almost imperceptible but it was there. The album’s producer, Kramer, captured the mood best when he signed off his sleeve notes to the original release with ‘come ride the fiery breeze’, somehow distilling the very essence of the band into those two final words. Their music was as fiery as anything that was coming out of Seattle at the time but its power was expressed gently – a breeze can do anything a hurricane can, it just takes a little while longer.

Dean Wareham’s songs on this album are almost hesitatingly introduced – a single chord strummed slowly, softly and repeatedly before a second, and sometimes final, is introduced. Naomi Yang’s bass meandering through the track with little or no attention to what the guitar is doing and Damon Krukowski caressing rather than beating his drums. Over this are Wareham’s slightly nasal vocals and his taut, tense guitar solos, an essential counterpoint to his hazy rhythm playing.

Live, they managed to almost literally mesmerise an audience. In his sleevenotes for the reissued Today, comedian Stewart Lee describes seeing Galaxie 500 in concert as a ‘transcendental experience.’ I only saw the band once, 14^th November 1990 at the International in Manchester and it was then, and remains to this day, the most absorbing performance I have ever experienced. As we filed away into the Manchester evening, the crowd spoke only in whispers.

By the time that what transpired to be their final album, This Is Our Music, was recorded the band had begun to tear themselves apart – Krukowski and Yang, a couple as well as a rhythm section, pulling in one direction, Wareham the other. The tension and regret, these three had been friends through school in NewYork and then at Harvard University, is documented in the lyrics to the album’s stand out track Sorry, ‘Seems like everything is business, and we’re sorry all the time’. This Is Our Music is a more polished affair than its predecessors but loses none of the intimacy that Galaxie 500 managed to engender in their sparse sound.

All three albums are released with bonus CDs. Today features Uncollected (rarities from the band’s entire career, from pre-Today demos to outtakes from the last recording sessions), whilst  On Fire comes with all collected Peel Sessions  and This Is Our Music comes complete with Copenhagen, a live recording of the band’s last ever European show.

This Is Their Music – Come ride the fiery breeze again.