Young galaxies don’t just appear. They are born of gases common and rare, of dusts that swirl and mix and super-collide, of ingredients so elemental that they season every object in the universe – are of every object in the universe.
Music can be that way too. Music can be defined by the collision of its influences and not by the influences themselves. And from that surge, new and vital sounds can emerge, surprising ones, at once familiar and, in a word, timeless.
Stephen Ramsay and Catherine McCandless are Young Galaxy. They stem from island roots, from Canada’s Western frontier, that place of rising tides, beach side campfires and fogged-in cedars. But Young Galaxy isn’t the stuff of island gales and Okanogan laments. There’s another facet, a cool urbaneness, the measured cadence of a city strut. Years spent in the fertile cosmopolitanism of Montreal have made their mark.
If Young Galaxy is a musical entity with its heart buried in leaves, its feet follow the striding beat and rhythmic pulses of the mirrored-glass and neon-lit city. And just as young galaxies are born of contradictions – bits of nothing made everything – so is their eponymous debut.
Song after song, we hear traces of the familiar retooled and delivered in ways we’d never have guessed at, never have conjured in a million years. They win us before we know that we’ve been won. For every defining element, the album has another to check and compliment it – brooding guitar licks and floral harmonies collide with rapt shoe-gazer choruses that transcend to an anthemic pastoral.
Young Galaxy, is an impressive entry point for a group at the beginning of their ascent. Call it a spark in the dry air of a sub-zero city or the child of a love of making music and of making music with the ones they love. Recorded with Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes) at his Breakglass Studio in the summer of 2005 and spring of 2006, and featuring appearances and performances by other dear friends, Young Galaxy has borne something concrete of something abstract and ephemeral. Young Galaxy is it.
Here, influences collide and birth new sounds, anthemically familiar, intriguingly obscure, osmotic or intended, ageless and utterly new. Young Galaxy transcends the micro-genreification of pop. Somehow, they have found a way back to a musical sensibility before rock was shattered into a thousand different aesthetic compromises. Young Galaxy have landed on the rarest musical alchemy and made of it an instant pop classic.
It was a NASA headline first. It holds true here. “Young Galaxy Surrounded by Material Needed to Make Stars.”
Hi from Florida! I think "Swing Your Heartache" is one of the best songs in the universe! I listen to it daily and make everyone I know listen to it to because because I don't think anyone should miss the experience, lol...then thy see why~♥ You're a great band with a great connection to each other; come to Florida!!
Perhaps you'll be in town (Vancouver that is ) for our showcase July 18th? Combine the Victorious, Guilty About Girls, Sex WIth Strangers: The Biltmore Cabaret.
Amazing on Saturday... You guys were great. I do find that your female singer's vocals on the tracks don't do justice to what she can do live, though. But you guys are breathtaking, Embers gives me chills... Love Come and See. I would definitely see you again, you guys were magnificent Saturday.
I was screaming out the lyrics to 'come and see', i think, it helped make that become the best day, ever. Expect me at your concert the next time you play in Toronto.
heeeey! i was at your concert on saturday in toronto, omg it was the best thing ive ever been to. i went to go see death cab and i thought the other bands were just like huge random, and i was in the long line to by a tshirt and thought it was just gonna be like whatever, i was waiting for death cab then i heard it and it was amazing. i got home and went on this huge mission to find your music, come and see is acuatlly like the greatest song, and theres a few others i like. could you tell me some moer good songs that you really like :)?
and just wanted to say thank you and good job on saturday, it was one of the best nightrs of my life.
Hey – just a reminder to listen in FRIDAY afternoon at 4:30-6 pm CST to hear YOUNG GALAXY on “This Great White North” an ALL CANADIAN music show from Austin, Texas It’s on 91. 7 KOOP-FM Listen here
