Uncollected
Pete Townshend once opined that a Mod's worst sin was "bad timing," a notion that Boston's great alt-rock hope, Galaxie 500, seemed doomed to embody when they broke up on the eve of theNirvana-spawned post-punk '90s gold rush. This 14-track compilation (plus a video for "Blue Thunder") of assorted demos, b-sides, and oddities was originally one of the highlights of the band's 1996 boxed retrospective and is available here as a stand-alone disc for the first time. The band's '87 demos capture G-500 at their most undistilled and insouciant, highlighted by Dean Wareham's jangly "Walking Song" and the fragile dreaminess of Naomi Young's "On the Floor." Wareham's weakness for tastefully snarky kitsch (which also seasons hisdroll modern collaborationwith Britta Phillips) surfaces on the band's psych-fest cover ofthe Rutles' "Cheese and Onions," while the '90 outtake cover of Young Marble Giants' "Final Day" (one of the last tracks G-500 cut) offers a tragic example of his band's compelling, if largely unfulfilled promise. A live, '89 medley ofthe Beatles' "Rain" andJonathan Richman's "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste" further underscores the band's charms: a decidedly irreverent affection for pop history, wed to a noisy, psych-punk sense of boundless possibilities.--Jerry McCulley