And, of course, part of the reason I'm so wholeheartedly behind some of these reunions is that I never got a chance to see the acts the first time around. Such is the case with Galaxie 500, a band I never even heard until around the year 2000 (via their cover of Joy Division's "Ceremony"), a full decade after they'd broken up. Last night, Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham played a set of the band's songs (backed by a full band including wife/collaborator Britta Phillips), and it was everything I could have hoped for. Even if I did only catch the tail end of "Snowstorm" due to a bum tip about set times.

Wareham's voice hasn't changed—it's still high, pinched whine that could grate in lesser hands but which contrasts perfectly with the band's subdued arrangements. And the band didn't mess around with the songs, either; everything sounded pretty much like it does on record. The drummer kept slow steady time with minimal flourishes but built up to crescendos that felt bigger than their size thanks to the overall understated vibe of the band. Phillips' played high melodic bass lines that cut through the wide open spaces left by Wareham and the other guitarist's strumming. Wareham broke into those slow, feedback heavy solos. The rhythm guitarist played a melodica. Every song gathered steam slow, broke into a solo or a hush, then revved up for one last little bit just to abruptly end.

Wareham introduced "Decomposing Trees" ("my toes can talk/and they're smiling at me") with a story: "This song is about a time I dropped acid with a couple friends of mine. A best friend of mine in high school was a born-again Christian, but first he was a Buddhist." I couldn't tell if this was part of the acid trip or not, but at some point, his Buddhist friend encountered a Christian group on the street who asked him if he knew what would happen to his soul when he died, and that freaked him out. Definitely part of the trip: "I sat with my feet in the mud, and my toes were talking to me. We found an old axe, and we were swinging it around and the head flew off." They met a talking tree, and one of Wareham's friends decided, "it was God. That friend was also born-again. His Jewish dad was bummed." He introduced "Strange," a song which contains maybe the most poignant reference to a Hostess snack product in all of indie rock, by noting, "I haven't seen a Twinkie in a long time." (A bandmate added that they'd recently seen some kind of faux-Twinkie in Canada.)

They played "Blue Thunder" and "When Will You Come Home." They closed with their version of Joy Division's "Ceremony," a rare sort of cover in that it seems to absorb everything good about the original while also somehow communicating all that has happened in the time since, all that we know about that song from the outside of it: in its aching, reverent pace, you hear a funeral march and memorial, even more so than you do in New Order's version. (There may be an auditory illusion at work here: I'm not sure Galaxie's version is actually that much slower than New Order's, but if it's not, it definitely feels slower.)

I may have missed a song at the beginning, and they played one I didn't know (indicated by question marks here), but anyway here's my go at a set list:

"Flowers"
"Snowstorm"
"Pictures"
"Temperature's Rising"
"Decomposing Trees"
"Strange"
"Blue Thunder"
??
"When Will You Come Home"
"Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste"
"Tugboat"
"Listen, the Snow Is Falling" (Yoko Ono)
"Fourth of July"

Encore
?
"Ceremony" (Joy Division)