Music Arcades: Galaxie 500: Boxed Set

This came out in 1996. Somehow I can't justify buying boxed sets for myself, but I can justify asking someone else to buy them as presents for me. So I got this at Christmas that year. I remember getting it back up to Sheffield and taking it into the office between Christmas and New Year so that I could watch the videos on the CD-ROM parts of the discs. That was an exciting innovation back then, having a 2½ inch choppily moving image in the middle of your screen (see also The Ultimate Blue Train), though it rapidly turned into a dead end. (All the videos are better viewed on the 2004 DVD release.)

This was still a time when the cost of music still felt non-trivial, and, despite my love for Galaxie 500, I never owned a copy of On Fire, their second album, until I got this set. It regularly gets voted best album in the polls of fans (yikes, Andy is currently featuring ads for The Book on his site — thanks, Andy!). It's probably my least favourite among their studio albums, but that's not really a criticism. Galaxie 500's worst is better than best.

I love just about everything across these four discs: the cover versions (especially the cover versions), the demo versions, the songs that Naomi sings on, everything. I could play it on endless loop indefinitely. It's as though, in the famous Neil Young dictum, it were all one song.

Update: I've just re-discovered the original Rykodisc website dedicated to the boxed set, which is archived on Andy's site.