When Dean Wareham gave up on the band Galaxie 500 in 1991, it seemed unlikely that the trio's remaining pair -- drummer Damon (Krukowski) and bass player Naomi (Yang) -- would even continue in the music business, much less forge a significant body of work.
But 14 years on, the duo has not only logged another stint with a rock band (Magic Hour) but also released six albums of their own, built up their publishing company and made their marks in poetry (Damon) and photography (Naomi).
Despite their relatively high profiles, the tour that brought Damon and Naomi to Iota on Tuesday night with Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara is still the kind of thing they don't do very often.
But they played like road veterans, spinning a web of low-key, psychedelic folk that Kurihara adroitly adorned with scorched electric-guitar lines.
Though chiefly concerned with their new album, "The Earth Is Blue," the musicians (with Damon now playing guitar, not percussion) also served up a clutch of covers that nicely framed their originals: the English country folk of Vashti Bunyan's "Winter Is Blue," Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren," "Love" by 1960s Japanese legends the Jacks and a spectral pass at Galaxie's "Blue Thunder."
Tunes such as "The Robot Speaks," which Krukowski called "a new song about the past," also evoked the Wareham era, but the real revelation was a merging of Caetano Veloso's "Araca Azul" and their new record's title track. With Kurihara's Gibson flickering, Damon and Naomi drifted into a gently floating, trippy dream, a milieu in which the pair crafted a comfortable artistic home.
-- Patrick Foster
