Galaxie 500: Michael Dean Wareham (vocals, guitar); Naomi Yang (bass); Damon Krukowski (drums).

Recorded at Noise New York, New York, New York in 1988. Includes liner notes by Byron Coley.

Personnel: Dean Wareham (vocals, guitar).

Liner Note Author: Byron Coley.

Photographers: Eugène Atget; Macioce; Sergio Huidor.

Simple, shimmering, and lovely, the Boston band Galaxie 500 made three excellent albums of dreamy guitar-pop during its short tenure in the late-1980s indie underground. TODAY, released in 1988, is the trio's first album and it establishes a musical blueprint from which the three rarely deviated, and with good cause. A steady bassline, spare, propulsive drums, and a simple three-chord progression--all this crests beneath lead singer Dean Wareham's distant lilt, and works magic on tracks like the heavily Velvet Underground-esque "Pictures," the bouncy "Oblivious," and the majestic closer "Tugboat," the band's first single. (The excellent b-side, "King of Spain," is included on the Ryko CD reissue.)

It's also important to note the band's brilliantly embellished cover of Jonathan Richman's a capella obscurity "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste," as it established Galaxie 500's talent for playing covers in a way that claimed the songs as their own and, in the process, extracted a previously unknown beauty from the work. The band's other two studio albums, FIRE and THIS IS OUR MUSIC, are both essential, and all of them make for a fine place to start. Of course, the beginning is as fine a place as any.