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REVIEWS: The Sub Pop Years ArtForum Intimacy: These liltingly guileless tracks are a testament to the rapport that two people may achieve over time with their audience. Manufactured intimacy: A "studio" version of the album Live in San Sebastian, overlaid with applause lifted from a live-show bootleg, does nothing to mitigate this aforementioned affect. Miraculous. Sunday Times (London) Last year's rerelease of More Sad Hits, the first album Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang made as Damon & Naomi after leaving Galaxie 500, was so well received, it's no surprise to find it quickly followed by this compilation of tracks from the duo's four Sub Pop albums (released between 1995 and 2002). Chronology is ignored, so the duo's earlier work is mixed up with the (relatively) fuller-sounding music made later with the Japanese band Ghost. If you're in a bright, bouncy mood, or if it's a sunny morning, you're best advised to avoid this album, as it will bring you right down; but at the right time, when you need to slow up, take a step back from your busy life, maybe even wallow for a bit in good old-fashioned self-pity, this could be the soundtrack you need. Is This Music? Oh goody! Following on from last year's welcome re-issue of their very fine debut More Sad Hits, comes this nigh on ESSENTIAL compilation of what Damon & Naomi did next. Signed to Sub Pop (I know, the title was a bit of a giveaway), they made four fine albums between 1995 and 2002. And they continue mining the rich vein of dreamy beauty that started when there old band Galaxie 500 released 'Tugboat' back in 1988. For a band who weren't even sure if they wanted to be a band, much less play live, they seemed to have grown in confidence as the years went by. Including a couple of very classy covers - their takes on Tim Hardin's 'Eulogy To Lenny Bruce' and Tim Buckley's 'Song To the Siren' (the latter giving both the original and This Mortal Coil's famous cover a good run for their money) it also contains original songs that sell them to you and you will want to play again and again. If forced to pick a highlight I would probably pick the almost painfully sublime 'The New World.' These are songs for cold winter nights, and yet the beauty is such that it will warm your heart. They continue to record and perform, and that's great news for the world at large. Stereogum.com It wasn't so long ago I posted about Galaxie 500 reissuing their original three albums and, in the process, brought up Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang's Damon & Naomi, Magic Hour, and the renaissance couple's twenty-year old Exact Change Press. Now the duo are releasing The Sub Pop Years, which compiles their favorite tracks from their four Sub Pop albums (The Wonderous World Of Damon & Naomi, Playback Singers, Damon & Naomi With Ghost, Songs To The Siren: Live In San Sebastian), spanning 1995-2002. There are so many beautiful, evocative, and (to these ears) classic songs on the 15-track collection, but I chose "The Great Wall" because it comes from my favorite of their SP albums, Damon & Naomi With Ghost, the 2000 collaboration with the mesmerizing Japanese psychedelic group Ghost. So it's to mark that release and also because of the way it moves into a mantra then takes off via Michio Kurihara's guitar playing after the 5-minute mark. It's hard to explain how exciting this collaboration felt when it first happened, but before you listen, here are a few sentences I scribbled when writing about Ghost's Hypnotic Underworld five years ago: Blurt After the demise of Galaxie 500 the rhythm section of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, a married couple, felt they had nowhere to go. In an interview I did with Naomi shortly after they formed Damon & Naomi, Yang had told me that no one was returning their phone calls and they were sad and frustrated. They ended up going back to their old pal Kramer and recording their debut, More Sad Hits (which was initially issued on Kramer's Shimmy Disc label but then got reissued by Sub Pop and has since been reissued on the band's own 20/20/20 label). This collection spans the 7 years they spent on the Seattle label from 1995-2002 and it cherry picks some of their best material (though, oddly, doesn't include any material from More Sad Hits). Opening with the hypnotic "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce" (a Tim Hardin cover) the record then sweeps into the gorgeous, Naomi-sung, "I'm Yours", an understated beauty that you'll want to go on forever. The downcast Damon-sung "Forgot to Get High" is another high point that is a Kramer production if ever I heard one (reverb and tape loops). Elsewhere there is a splendid, live Tim Buckley cover of "Song to the Siren" (the collection also includes 4 other songs from 2002's Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian from a 2001 gig in Spain). Other than wishing they'd included some cuts off the stellar debut and a few other omissions (No "The New Historicism"?!) The Sub Pop Years is still a sublime collection from some music biz veterans who seem to be from a different era (and would probably not want to be called music biz anything). This is psychedelic folk music done right. Dusted For anyone chasing the tale of the exploding Galaxie 500 juggernaut, rhythm section Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang were the unpredictable hermeticists to lead singer and guitarist Dean Wareham's proforma career moves. 1992's More Sad Hits, planned as "a farewell," as the duo state in their liner notes, is one of the most heartbreakingly honest documents of interpersonal betrayal and confusion ever released, wrapped up in one of Kramer's gauziest productions. The musical lexicon wasn't too far removed from Galaxie 500's chilblain pop, but there were already hints that Damon and Naomi were ready to spread their wings - the wild coda of "This Car Climbed Mount Washington," the Robert Wyatt references dotted throughout. 1995's The Wondrous World of Damon and Naomi was a special moment for some of us. Turning to folk music and agrarian American traditional music, it set the course for three subsequent albums, Playback Singers, Damon and Naomi with Ghost (recorded with the Japanese psych outfit), and Live in San Sebastian, the not-actually-live album with Ghost's guitarist Michio Kurihara. (Wondrous World also inspired one of the finest record reviews I've ever read, by Kevin Moist in his Deep Water 'zine, where he correctly gauged both the deeply personal and benignly universal motifs at the heart of the record.) The Sub Pop Years pulls together a grab-bag of songs from those four albums and acts as a great primer for a period where Damon and Naomi were feeling their way into a new song, a new way of being - singers instead of players, front-people instead of backline, wordsmiths alongside musicians. The selections are great, though they rely more on Damon and Naomi's melancholy - the lovely "Tour of the World" is one of the shining exceptions, where Kramer's tapes suddenly drop the duo in front of a festival audience and they sing out like an American Incredible String Band. But their sad hits allow them to make the most of the bittersweet tang of their voices, and when embellished by the players from Ghost, songs like "The Navigator" or "Turn of the Century" positively ripple with sadness. Like many great solo artists or duos, Damon and Naomi often imagine the band they need to support their songs best, and then go about creating that band (either with collaborators, or via their own imaginations), and many of the songs on The Sub Pop Years feature great examples of ensemble playing. It's telling that even their only 'truly duo' album, Playback Singers, features some glorious performances, like the drowsy, blissed-out arbor of "Eye of the Storm," that have all the power of a simpatico group setting. Because the chronology's deliberately muddled, you don't necessarily get to directly hear the 'blossoming' of Damon and Naomi, the socialisation of what was once an intensely private endeavour. Instead, The Sub Pop Years tells a different, and probably more gripping, story - of artists who have continually searched for epiphany at the heart of a song, who've looked for the eternal in the gentle strum of the guitar, the raspy drone of the harmonium, and the twin angel sighs of Naomi's drifting, melodic bass lines, and Damon and Naomi's voices. But you're also reminded of how quietly pioneering Damon and Naomi were, riffing on acid folk from the 1970s when everyone was still surfing in the grunge fallout zone, and connecting with Japanese psych rock years before Acid Mothers Temple became indie household names. The Sub Pop Years tells the story of that development - seven years of feet-finding and roots-gathering. The next step, as you can hear on 2005's The Earth Is Blue and 2008's Within These Walls, is the self-assured realisation of the dream logic at the heart of the Damon and Naomi song. But if you haven't yet dipped your fingers in their first phase, The Sub Pop Years will prove positively revelatory. These are songs of everyday profundity and victory over adversity. Drowned in Sound Former members of fabulous dream poppers Galaxie 500 and long time duo, Damon & Naomi (yes, fact fans, the same Naomi from that Neutral Milk Hotel song) have been churning out Velvets-like folk that tugs hard on the old ticker strings for what seems like an eternity; The Sub Pop Years gather together their finest moments from their days signed to the legendary Seattle-based label. The Sub Pop Years is split into four parts, beginning with three tracks from 1995’s The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi. ‘Forgot to Get High’ wanders and drifts like clouds on an amber-drenched skyline, moving into ‘Tour of the World’, a weave of Cocteau Twins melodies, filtered in applause, which adds a certain sense of theatre to the song. ‘How Long’ sounds a little bit like Robert Pollard drifting in and out of a coma. The essence of Damon & Naomi is tempered by how much they hold back, the songs hidden under a onion-skin thin veil of drama, further trapped in a sense of claustrophobic, unapologetic cool. Despite this distance, they draw you in, each song alluring, the velvet gloved hand reaching out from the shadows. We move on to 1998's Playback Singers with ‘I’m Yours’, a desperate, degenerating desert serenade, Naomi’s vocals lingering, the rattle snake hissing in the barren grass. ‘Eye of the Storm’ wavers magnificently. In 2000 Damon & Naomi sided up with Japanese experimental psyche-os Ghost, collaborating on the sterling Damon & Naomi with Ghost. The opening track from that album is a cover of ‘Eulogy to Lenny Bruce’, a song made famous by Nico. There is beauty in the sadness here, Naomi’s vocals capturing the moment where loss meets desolation and despair on the crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Ghost’s superb guitarist Michio Kurihara plays on nine of the tracks that make up this album, and his ornate style is showcased on the second cover ‘Song to the Siren’. Tim Buckley's much adapted song comes to life during the heart-aching guitar solo. It's the title track from Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian, which documents the tour the duo undertook with Kurihara, and makes up the fourth and final part of The Sub Pop Years. It runs the gamut of their dreamy oeuvre, from the epic twists and turns of ‘The New World’ - which has a feel of somebody tossing and turning during a deep sleep - to the escapist drift of ‘The Navigator’. This final summing up of a golden period might conceivably be the last musical release from the duo, with the pair continuing to devote their time towards running Exact Change, the independent book publishing company they own. Flicking through a copy of Damon’s book of prosetry The Memory Theater Burned brings me to the conclusion that he should persevere with the pen. Unlike many compilations that serve merely to showcase singles, The Sub Pop Years filters the crowning moments of each album and makes the release a worthwhile introduction to those previously unaware of the duo. If you’re the type who likes to get lost, before finding yourself engulfed in the toxic fumes of prozac-folk then you can’t go far wrong with this intimate collection. All Music Guide The breakup of Galaxie 500 left Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang disillusioned and ready to give up music. After being drawn back by Kramer, the duo recorded More Sad Hits for Shimmy Disc under the name Damon & Naomi. They decided to stick with music after this, and signed to Sup Pop where they stayed for seven years and released four albums. This collection gathers up a collection of songs from that era hand-selected by the duo. It serves as both a wonderful introduction to their quiet, acid folk-informed style and as a greatest hits of sorts, as it picks a lot of the band's most memorable songs. While the first two albums (The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi and Playback Singers) are represented by three songs each, the band's brilliant collaborations with Ghost (Damon & Naomi with Ghost) and Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara (Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian) are given more entries; four and five respectively. This weighted distribution makes for a stronger collection, one that will please longtime fans who want an overview of one of the better under-the-radar bands of their era. Time has a habit of getting away from you. It sneaks in a few extra years when you're not looking. Unbelieveably the start of "The Sub Pop Years" was fourteen years ago, it's seven years since they finished and somehow this retrospective compilation makes it all feel like yesterday. From the ashes of Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi rose pheonix like to firmly establish themselves as a duo as well as half of Magic Hour. Looking back it seems as though the term ethereal beauty had been coined in anticipation of Damon & Naomi coming into existance. Pitchfork Galaxie 500 was a great group, but as usual the glory went to the guitarist. Not that Dean Wareham was much more capable a singer or musician than his former bandmates (far from it), but once he formed Luna, he did seem more naturally inclined toward the spotlight. Meanwhile, the underrated Galaxie 500 rhythm section of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang nestled into their niche on the margins, content to call it quits but quietly prodded by some polite benefactors (among them Galaxie 500 producer and Shimmy Disc majordomo Kramer) to continue their hushed career as a duo. The pair's other prime benefactor was Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop, who, following Damon & Naomi's debut, More Sad Hits, signed the two for a near-decade of increasingly confident releases, culminating in 2000's peak collaboration with Ghost. Admittedly, that decade resulted in a mere three studio albums, but Damon & Naomi's relatively limited output makes them a good candidate for a concise career overview compilation, which The Sub Pop Years welcomingly provides. Divided more or less evenly between The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi, Playback Singers, and Damon & Naomi With Ghost, while adding material from a 2002 tour document, The Sub Pop Years likely won't spark any epiphanies, but it does help coalesce a career that often, by design or not, threatened to float off into the ether and disappear. When Damon & Naomi get real gone, they practically vanish, and certainly as vocalists Krukowski and Yang were far from forceful, preferring to hover rather than soar. But their songs do build, gently and gradually, with all the invisible grace of a sunrise, letting in the light a little at a time until even barely there tracks such as "New York City", "Tour of the World", "The Mirror Phase", and "Turn of the Century" achieve more in terms of emotion than they initially let on. The two know their limitations but embrace them, too, with each song a meditation on simplicity almost presented as paeans to life's slow-motion inevitability. One can easily imagine what, say, demolitionist dervish Neil Young would do with a song like "Judah and the Maccabees". Damon & Naomi, on the other hand, deliver an epic by implication, content enough in its own austerity to let the elliptical portent seep rather than spill out. It helps that, between the studio album and the live disc, more than half of the songs on this comp feature contributions from Ghost, and particularly Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara, who turns out to be such an oddly suited collaborator. Odd, because never do Damon & Naomi reach the heights of his legendary band (though the extended Kurihara-fied coda of "The Great Wall" is pretty hypnotically great) but suited all the same because he knows how to modulate his playing to support Krukowski and Yang's quiet storm. That Kurihara has stuck with the duo for its subsequent studio albums as well makes The Sub Pop Years an ideal bridge from past to present for anyone playing catch-up. Pop Matters The collective of vocalist/guitarist Dean Wareham, drummer Damon Krukowski, and bassist Naomi Yang, which comprised the influential minimalist shoegaze band Galaxie 500 from 1986-1991, took a significant blow when Wareham left the group and joined up with ex-Feelies and Chills members to form Luna in 1992. At this point, already romantically involved and in the midst of starting a book publishing company together, Krukowski and Yang floundered a bit while they tried to make sense of their music careers. They ended up releasing a few leftover tracks under the name Pierre Etoile through Rough Trade before debuting as Damon & Naomi with More Sad Hits (1992), which according to the band was originally meant to be a reconciliatory farewell to the music industry. Instead, it turned out to be the beginning of a new, ongoing chapter for the duo. Considering the different directions they went after parting ways, it's easy to see where a rift might have emerged between the two split parties of Galaxie 500: while Wareham took a more structured and up-tempo path with Luna, Damon & Naomi opted instead to fully pursue Galaxie's most muted and ethereal qualities, ending up with a sound initially less accessible, but perhaps ultimately more consistent with their former band. In fact, the difference between the two can be summed up by the divergent, albeit related, subgenres that each extracted and pursued from the amalgam that existed within Galaxie 500-Luna unabashedly embraced the dream-pop angle, while Damon & Naomi explored its slowcore flipside. After More Sad Hits, the couple not only began serving as the rhythm section for the newly formed band Magic Hour, but were also convinced to sign to Sub Pop for the four albums represented in this collection. If anything, the first of these, The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi, showed that the group was in the process of finding their feet. Still working with the famed, madly prolific producer known as Kramer who had helmed all of Galaxie 500's records, Damon & Naomi's earliest work felt for the most part relatively plodding and muddled as they tried to hang onto old practices and alliances. It was the move away from the studio and their longtime producer and towards a more lo-fi, homespun aesthetic on their follow-up, Playback Singers, that ushered in their most fruitful era. The tracklist on The Sub Pop Years doesn't move in chronological order, instead favoring a scattered approach motivated by flow and pacing, so it's difficult to gauge the gradual change that took place in their sound over the years. The collection might have even benefited from the former method, which would more clearly illustrate how much they gained from joining with the Japanese psychedelic band Ghost for their next release, the aptly titled Damon & Naomi with Ghost. Finally embracing live touring, and having more-or-less permanently adopted Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara into the group, Damon & Naomi now fully came into their own as an outfit. Their final album for Sub Pop and the one with the largest offering on this collection, the live album Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian, found them playing a stellar show with Kurihara, revisiting and improving upon many of their old songs as well as performing the inspired new title track, a Tim Buckley cover. Interestingly, the album was not recorded in San Sebastian at all after a last-minute change of tour plans, but was instead recorded in a living room in Cambridge with crowd noise from other recorded shows dubbed in. A strange method to be sure, but it resulted in undoubtedly their finest album for Sub Pop, a high note on which they left to begin releasing equally stellar albums on their own 20/20/20 imprint. The changes that took place over Damon & Naomi's time at Sub Pop were subtle but momentous for the group, which is what allows the material to seamlessly fit together, though the more engaging moments, i.e. those with Ghost, tend to stick out. That's not to say the tracks representing the earlier years are subpar-they are solid selections, particularly the bittersweet rumination of "How Long" and the dreamy spacerock of "In the Sun"-it's just that on their later albums, with additional talented musicians filling out their basic acoustic guitar/bass/tambourine makeup, the beautiful melodies and wistful lyrics and voices are that much more well-balanced and magnificent. Some of the characteristics ascribed to Galaxie 500 certainly remain intact under those circumstances too, as Kurihara's guitar on "New York City" almost sounds lifted right off the Velvet Underground's third, self-titled album, providing a liquidy, immaculate counterpoint to Naomi's vocally blissed-out reflection on drifting away from the city while "the sun is always setting in my eyes". Melodically, it doesn't get much better than the expansive and jaw-dropping vocals that that the duo lay down together on "The Mirror Phase", which soar on top of Naomi's harmonium and Ghost's impressionistic backing tones to create perhaps the finest moment here. Though not quite as engaging as their full-length albums with Ghost-seriously, a match made in heaven-The Sub Pop Years is a fascinating document of the most formative years of Damon & Naomi's rewarding partnership. For those interested in any of the above-mentioned bands or genres, this is a near-essential retrospective that will likely inspire further exploration of this duo's ever-blossoming catalogue. Big Takeover, #65 You know when a friend makes you a mix CD of their favorite band and it's perfectly ordered, ignoring chronology or hit-single status for the sake of listenability-and you listen to it over and over again? This collection is like that, but put together by the duo themselves. It covers their years recording for Sub Pop, thus touching their whole career aside from their first LP and their newest. It captures the adventure they've been on, the way their music has grown from their world travels and collaborations, not to mention the passing of time. But more than that, the focus is on the gripping songs that find their own way to express powerful emotions and ideas. Record Collector The interest stirred up by last year's reissue of the classic debut LP, More Sad Hits, has resulted in further mining of the post-Galaxie 500 duo's catalogue. Despite the band's (short-lived) refusal to tour, they were snapped up by Sub Pop after the aforementioned record, whereupon they refined their sound over four albums and seven years. This compilation collects the best of that work, including many of their collaborations with kindred spirits, the Japanese band Ghost. As an introduction to this stage of their career, The Sub Pop Years presents their most accessible work and, despite being arranged in non-chronological order, hangs together well. The consistency of the material means that highlights are aplenty: the epic The Great Wall changes gear from a lullaby-like mantra to a mesmerising psychedelic ending courtesy of Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara; Tim Hardin's Eulogy to Lenny Bruce is transformed into a hypnotic, seemingly bottomless bruise of a song; Forgot to Get High's acoustic layers provide a clear precedent to much of Radiohead's earlier, more subtle material. Roots and Branches What it says, an anthology of the material the duo recorded for the label between 1995-2002 following the demise of Galaxie 500. Drawn from The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi, Playback Singers, Damon & Naomi With Ghost and the live Song To The Siren, it's a journey through lo fi dreamy and tranquil narcotic psychedelia that gathers together such forgotten hushed gems as Judah And The Maccabees, the eight minute Great Wall with its leisurely drift from somnambulant Glen Campbell chill to the electric guitar solo climax, the twangy noir guitar and dark, brooding folk of I'm Yours, Eye of the Storm's feedback freak folk, In The Sun (where they sound like Nico fronting The Cowboy Junkies) and, of course, their euphoric cover of the Tim Buckley classic. A useful recap for fans and an excellent primer for newcomers, and hopefully a follow up to Within These Walls should be along sometimes next year. Other Music Damon and Naomi are not really a "greatest hits" sort of an outfit; after originally coming to prominence as the rhythm section of Galaxie 500, the couple have remained low-key cultural icons, releasing numerous haze-filled albums as a duo as well as in several permutations collaborating with a variety of underground psychedelic legends, running a great underground press, and generally being interesting people. And while this collection from their first four duo releases may not have any top ten moments, it comprises the best of some of their best stuff, including their essential work with Japanese psych heroes Ghost. Culled from four albums on Seattle's mighty Sub Pop imprint, this album is a 'Best Of' package that takes in Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang's work from 1995 (starting with selections from The Wondrous World Of Damon & Naomi) encompassing their much celebrated collaboration with Japanese psychedelic mavens Ghost. This album becomes particularly illuminating when listened to in the context of the recent reissues of Galaxie 500's back catalogue, tracing the duo's creative progress from their influential origins through the nineties and on into the early 21st century. One thing that stands out is just how consistent their music is in its ethereal elegance, managing to spin ballads that sound dreamlike and not quite of this world without ever coming across as excessively frail or twee. All this comes in preparation for the new Damon & Naomi album which is currently in the works, but this one-stop refresher course in their art is sure to make a fan of many a new listener in the meantime. Mojo Cherry picks from duo's four albums of glassy voiced, sad-eyed folk for Sub Pop. Four tracks from their atmospheric collaboration with Japanese psychedelicists Ghost have added fairy dust. The Wire Despite how quiet and plaintive they often sound, Damon & Naomi's music divides opinion. This collection of songs, recorded between 1995 and 2002, offers clear indicators why. Their previous group Galaxie 500 demonstrated just how far you could take a very specific point of origin -- in essence The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" -- and successfully build and entire oeuvre upon it. For their own releases, the duo retained this pared back approach but applied it to a different range of influences, at first with a somewhat tentative charm on their 1992 debut, More Sad Hits, then with a growing sense of confidence. However, the basic sound of Damon & Naomi has remained rudimentary and artless, build on slowly strummed guitars and a floating, almost spectral strain of folk rock. Their covers of Nico's "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce" and Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" eschew any kind of head-on attempt to match the intensity of previous versions, and instead take a detour into a kind of wistful reverie. While this is neighter a grand folly nor brilliantly counter-intuitive, it does say something about the way Damon & Naomi approach their music, and perhaps why it's not going to work for everyone. Their collaboration with Japanese psychedelic ensemble Ghost, released on Sub Pop in 2000, saw the latter adapting their sometimes wayward muse to the duo's more modest demands, adding a layer of subtle sophistication to compositions which nevertheless remain at heart stubbornly basic. Tellingly, the jumbled-up chronology of the selections from their four Sub Pop albums included here doesn't involve any bold leaps back and forth in style or jarring juxtapositions: the sound is assiduously homogenous. While one person's homogeneity is another's monotony, the unwavering evenness of tone indicates a boldness of purpose beneath Damon & Naomi's surface fragility. And such singlemindedness may be exactly what inspires the devotion of their followers. Sheffield Telegraph HOVERING somewhere between Fairport Convention, grunge and soda pop is The Sub Pop Years. The album's a 15-track journey through the band's history with prestigious Seattle label Sub Pop, which signed Damon & Naomi in 1992 after the pair released More Sad Hits. Opening track Eulogy for Lenny Bruce is a fragile piano-led tale of loss. Vocals are restrained and sparse, leaving room for rolling, delicate keys. It's a strange choice of an album opener - neither catchy or particularly emotive. But I'm Yours, the second track, soon establishes the quality that earned Sub Pop attention - wildly off-piste grunge folk. Guitar-playing is off-kilter, bass rumbles subtly, making nods to Fairport Convention's Danny Thompson, and vocals adopt a traditional folk aesthetic. Occasionally the guitar dips into distorted mud, which gives the otherwise straight folk song a grungey edge. Other highlights include Eye of the Storm, which opens with transcendent backmasked guitar. It's not difficult to see why the label that discovered Nirvana grabbed this bizarre folk duo. Shakenstir.co.uk Arguably, the greatest thing about being involved in the business and art of music is that of discovery. I have never heard Damon & Naomi before this review and I wish I had - much earlier. But, better late than never, as they say, and this is a great place to start the love affair. Opening track 'Eulogy To Lenny Bruce' (written by Tim Hardin and from the 2000 album DAMON & NAOMI WITH GHOST) is a delicate affair with softly flowing and piano notes introducing the fragile tones of Naomi's voice. The piano notes rise and fall and the ambience created is mournful, sorrowful. I've not heard the original song but this interpretation really works for me as a sincere and moving tribute. 1998's "I'm Yours' (from PLAYBACK SINGERS) opens with the most subtle guitar backdrop and a distant vocal. The glacial pace and ambience created reminds me of earlier Low music and I'm left wondering if D & N actually influenced Low… It's a gorgeous song that builds so, so slowly to its final instrumental crescendo. 'Forgot To Get High' is from 1995's THE WONDROUS WORLD OF DAMON & NAOMI and is my introduction to Damon's equally soft and fragile voice. The song sounds as fresh as today with its flashes of spoken commentary, and the mournful guitar wail that continues throughout the song. And underneath it all is the most subtle melody. I'm blown away by this… 'New York City' (from 2002's SONG TO THE SIREN) is a wistful, lighter tune with another featherlight and understated Naomi vocal. 'Eye Of The Storm' (from 1998's PLAYBACK SINGERS) offers up a more solid sonic experience with guitar and vocal sounding more assertive and clear. Around the middle-eight there are weird and wonderful instrumental samples that sound like the instruments are playing in reverse… It's one of the album's standout tracks. 'Judah And The Maccabees' (from DAMON & NAOMI WITH GHOST) is a prime example of the association with the Japanese band, its intuitive drumming and sparse piano notes adding another fascinating dimension to the duo's music. It's another of my favourite album tracks. 'Tour Of The World' sounds like a live track from THE WONDROUS WORLD OF DAMON & NAOMI (but could easily be sampled for the song). It's a sweet, meandering, melodic song performed with such a rare, light touch. Towards the end there's an extended vocal and instrumental crescendo that completes the song in fine style. Other songs include 'Son To The Siren', 'The Navigator', 'The Mirror Phase', 'How Long', 'The New World', 'The Great Wall', 'In The Sun' and 'Turn Of The Century.' I have seldom heard such musical integrity demonstrated. There are no gimmics, no massive overproduction, just simple contemporary folk music and overtly sincere performances. This has been a revelation for me and I believe it will be for many who have never been exposed to Damon & Naomi's music before. The other major thing that struck me was how fresh this music sounds, and remember some of these songs and performances are up to 14 years old. I am both moved and impressed. BBC Review "The music industry in the early 90s was on a money-crazed high," write Damon & Naomi, in liner-notes to this compilation of their work for venerated US underground label Sub Pop. "It all seemed so irrelevant to what was meaningful to us about music, we decided to stay away." Certainly, no-one could accuse the duo of being shameless self-promoters. When their previous group - the dreamily downbeat Massachusetts indie trio Galaxie 500 - split following the exit of frontman Dean Wareham in 1991, Damon & Naomi had to be cajoled into recording again by Galaxie's long-serving producer, Kramer. Similarly, they resisted touring until members of Japanese psychedelic group Ghost agreed to serve as their backing band in 1995, beginning a relationship that would continue into the studio, delivering 2000's wonderful With Ghost album. As befits such reluctant 'stars', they make fine bedroom music: introverted and melancholic, but possessed of a beauty that seduces easily. Stepping back from the reverb-heavy dream-pop of Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi favour an achingly restrained folksong: early tracks like Forgot to Get High and Tour of the World evoke the first Velvets album with their muted melodies, sparse instrumentation and death-rattle tambourine, and in their hypnotic, entrancing ambience. It's this simplicity that makes their hushed and unassuming music so affecting. With the addition of Ghost's Michio Kurihara, who plays lead guitar on twelve of these fifteen tracks, Damon & Naomi found a musician whose emotive playing perfectly complimented their sad, wise music: their cover of Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren finds Kurihara plucking a tear-stricken tremolo-laden solo that's the perfect counterpart to the duo's dolorous harmonies, while his heart-breaking slide-guitar licks on The Mirror Phases wonderfully accent that song's graceful mourn. These, then, are soothing lullabies for troubled adults: understated, deftly-played, swallowing the listener up in their narcotic embrace. Damon & Naomi's music is sublime stuff, and a little goes a long way - indeed, perhaps 80 minutes of this muted mood music is a little overpowering to hear in one sitting - but this lovingly-sequenced and selected collection is the perfect introduction to their twilight world. The Skinny Following the demise of Galaxie 500, Damon (Krukowski) & Naomi (Yang) stuck together, lowered the volume and continued in a similarly dreamy mould. Specialising in serenely soporific lullabies, the only challenge to the tranquil calm they create is likely to be listeners' attempts to muffle their heartbeats lest they drown out the subdued somnambulism. The Sub Pop Years draws from each of their albums with the label, from The Wonderful World Of and Playback Singers through their work with Japanese psychedelics Ghost and on to their San Sebastian live release (represented here by a sugar-sweet rendition of New York City amongst others). Their collaborations with Ghost are strongest - Judah and the Maccabees is teary perfection, while the oneiric Great Wall is eight drifting minutes that feels like two - and while their minimalism won't appeal to everyone, this is an excellent introduction to the duo's hushed charms. Bearded Magazine The extensive history of Damon and Naomi's past musical projects is tough to sum up in a few sentences, but I'll give it a shot as it makes for a pretty interesting tale for those unfamiliar with the pair. The twosome are ex-Galaxie 500 drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang, who after the demise of their former band released a few tracks under the moniker Pierre Etoile. With no further plans to continue with their music, they turned their attention to their book publishing company, but were later persuaded to return to writing songs, producing More Sad Hits in '92, which led to them joining the Sub Pop roster. After vowing never to perform live an offer of a show in Japan forced them to reconsider their decision and the pair asked Tokyo band Ghost to join them, forging a friendship that would lead to future collaborations including 'Damon and Naomi with Ghost'. Spanning from '95-'02 and combining tracks from their three Sub Pop releases, this collection depicts an illuminating, assured narration of faded experiences and fragile states, with a distinctive homemade quality owed to living room recording sessions. Their harmonies form and blend with an almost sibling-like symmetry, his voice clear and sombre; hers thick and luminous, embracing restful instrumentals with a touching melancholy. The steady, soft harmonies of 'New York City' recall the lethargic drones of Nico, and the metallic ringing-out of guitar strings form dreamy clouds of simplified sound. 'Eye Of The Storm' gently cradles a hum of fractured instrumentals, while 'Tour Of The World' echoes with a glowing comfort and unspoken softness, with applause threading through the twinkling bells and lulling percussion. Combining a cut and paste of produced recordings and taped live bootleg atmospherics could make for slightly pretentious listening, but the unhindered fluidity of the paired recordings produce a delicately personal and candid experience. A good starting point for future exploration. Subba-Cultcha The best of four albums brought together in the same room Previously known as two thirds of the ethereal indie outfit Galaxie 500, who came to an end with only four years and three albums on the clock in 1991, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang have long since recovered from the uninspired position it seemed to place them. Eventually they returned, mended and with vaulting ambition to commence forwards resulting in the warm, almost understated species of music that fashions their songs. This album is a retrospective collation of what is considered the best of the four albums they recorded when signed to incendiary Seattle label Sub Pop in 1995-2002. It's an instinct which seems precise enough with the inclusion of "Song To The Siren" and "The Great Wall". Whatever else they may become authors of in the future this record will remain the impressive commentator of their past. emusic Married drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang weren't kidding when they dubbed their first album as a duo More Sad Hits. After the split of their previous group, the much-imitated Galaxie 500 (with Dean Wareham, later of Luna and Dean & Britta), Damon & Naomi figured they'd make one last record and be done, but after More Sad Hits, Sub Pop signed the couple and issued four more albums, including a live disc recorded in San Sebastian. Damon & Naomi avoided the mid-'90s alt-rock gold rush, tending to the melancholic folk-rock they'd pioneered in G500, later collaborating with Tokyo fellow travelers Ghost (whose electric guitarist Michio Kurihara would join them on the live set). Along with their small publishing house, Exact Change, and Krukowski's side career as a book and music critic, they've become a model of bohemian enterprise without compromising their vision. So it is that The Sub Pop Years doesn't necessarily call up its specific era: these songs exist out of time, just the way Damon & Naomi wanted it. Both Krukowski and Yang sing long, hazy, drifting vocal lines; even when things get loud, the arc remains smooth and a hair unsettling. That's especially true when Ghost helps out: "New York City," presented in the San Sebastian live version, and "The Great Wall," from 2000's Damon & Naomi with Ghost, are peaks, with the latter being both the collection's longest (eight-and-a-half minutes) and loveliest track, building but never quite peaking, or seeming to need to - an apt metaphor for the duo's career. Artrocker This is a one-CD, 15-track anthology of ex-Galaxie 500 rhythm section Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang's four albums which they recorded for the now-legendary Sub Pop label. It charts the pair from their blurred, homemade debut, "More Sad Hits" (1992), to the point where they became a "power" trio; joining forces with ace eclectic guitarist Michio Kurihara (also fo Ghost, Boris, White Heaven) on 2002's CD/DVD offering "Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian". Highlights include the beautiful "Judah and the Maccabees" as a great example of their more recent, smoother studio sound, while "Tour of the World" is a great example of their imaginative use of lo-fi home recording equipment back in the old days. This is a poignant collection of melancholia that is ageless and understated. The Noise Boston Phoenix The cover of Damon & Naomi: The Sub Pop Years is framed like a Polaroid, and the image itself - a bluish superimposition of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang - reads like an unfinished double exposure on old film, the pair caught mid bloom. Regardless of what was intended, the shot is a fitting expression of what this collection - far more than a bouquet of hits - documents. Those Sub Pop years (1995-2002) weren't merely an arc of recovery period from the nasty 1991 break-up of Galaxie 500 - they also witnessed a prolonged foregrounding of the two. You don't get much farther back on the proverbial stage than the rhythm section of a dream-pop act, so their gradual inching to the forefront of their music - as well as the way it just keeps getting more beautiful, more erudite, and more luminous - was no short journey. "It was a long transition from being at the back to coming to the front - and for that to be okay," laughs Yang. "We were very reluctant to stop being a rhythm section. When we first started playing as a duo, I remember feeling like, 'Sorry! Just ignore us! We'll be done soon!' " "You listen to these records," adds Krukowski, "and it's sort of like us coming out of the mist." He could mean that in a few ways. After the split with Dean Wareham, the two just "stopped - stopped trying to be in a band, and stopped hanging out with other bands," according to the liner notes of More Sad Hits - an album produced (and mixed) in 1992 by their right-hand svengali, Mark Kramer, and originally released on his Shimmy Disc label. If releasing an album seems like a strange way to stop being a band, think of More Sad Hits as a flushing of the gutters (only far prettier than that image suggests). The sounds were largely Galaxie-inspired, the content was largely Galaxie-concerned, the tone, the recording, the songwriting - it all swirled into a kind of mist that obscured them with unwitting nostalgia. If anything, the comp finds them reinterpreting this uncertainty into something more promising, like possibility. "It was daunting to go back to those records," Krukowski says of the four Sub Pop releases from which they culled this collection. "The process became this interesting encounter with what our songs were about." The other mist in question might simply be sonic. Three years after More Sad Hits, Damon & Naomi debuted on Sub Pop with The Wondrous World Of . . . - another Kramer production, and a rather tense one (since he had just kicked the weed). That record had them performing as a duo for the first time - an experience that made them a bit more protective of their budding ideas. The following albums - right up to their most recent effort, 2007's Within These Walls (20|20|20) - have been recorded in their Cambridge apartment, with ever increasing fidelity. The 1998 Playback Singers was an eight-track bedroom affair. Their 2000 collaboration Damon & Naomi with Ghost was a 16-track hootenanny, as they hosted the Japanese group through the sessions. They've since worked with a seriously unshabby 24-track home studio - and, it would seem, very understanding neighbors. The release of the compilation coincides with 1001 Nights (Factory 25), a DVD that collects tour diaries filmed and edited by Yang over the course of their European and Japanese tours with Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara, a pair of live performances in Tokyo, and three stunningly minimal short films by filmmaker Cedrick Eymenier set to Damon & Naomi songs. The collection of Sub Pop releases allows us to hear the two getting comfortable with themselves: Krukowski's pining high vocal trails riding confident atop thick acoustic chords; Yang's ghostly campfire croon gliding in and out of focus against her harmonium; Kurihara's guitar lines coursing through the songs like a bloodstream. But the film lets us witness it all happening. "Those were the moments that we started to feel good about playing," Krukowski recalls of the tours. And when he describes their travels in Japan as an immersion course, he's not talking about just language. The past few years have been an immersion course in themselves - a relearning of everything they had, for a moment, entertained forgetting. "We had let the whole band concept go before we started doing this again," he says. "So the big question was 'Why? Why do it?' " The Sub Pop Years provides as clear and ringing an answer as we're likely to get. The two have never sounded better than they do right now - or, more to the point, than they will Friday at the Cambridge YMCA. And as always, the present is the moment they attend to. If we're lucky, theirs is a picture that will never finish developing. Hour (Montreal) Damon (Krukowski) & Naomi (Yang) hold special seats at the American independent music scene table, both for efforts past (a little band they were in called Galaxie 500) and, of course, the project that they put their own names to beginning way back in 1991. The duo in life, love and music have released nine albums of loving, lovely, quiet and sad pop music, sharing yearning and heartfelt vocals with near equal parts folk and experimentalism (check out their more recent digs with Japanese guitarist Michio Kurihara for the more freaky fried offerings). With such a pedigree, this project has been criminally underappreciated by most when it comes to the big picture of artists who've affected the last 25 years of the musical underground. "I imagine most in music feel that way, whether they are playing stadiums or underground clubs, because this is a business of people craving attention, and if you crave something, when is it ever enough?" says Krukowski. "But I imagine that there are also, equally spread out across every level, those moments of true connection that happen through music. It's a dreadful cliché, but they really do make it all worthwhile. We know what other people's music has meant to us." Since the release of the 2007 gem Within These Walls, the pair have put together two retrospective projects, one audio and one video, and recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their small-press publishing house (Exact Change). So what's next for the dynamic duo? "We've always waited to record until our reasons for making a new album come clear," explains Damon. "Each one has been a project with a fairly clear goal or idea behind it. And we typically only get one of those ideas every third year or so!" Stay tuned... Time Off Wandering out of the late 80s/early 90s slowcore dream that was Galaxie 500, the rhythm section of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang turned their attention to a much sparser landscape with Damon & Naomi. An intoxicating mixture of lost guitars, loping melodies and intertwined, siren-like vocals, the duo somehow wiped away all the static sound of their previous band to make music that was using so much less but in some ways achieved so much more. This collection comprises the highlights of the duo's seven years on the Sub Pop label, a period where along with labelmates like Codeine, a mirage of the most imperturbable sounds coalesced to make the slowcore side of the indie-rock genres an enriching, if all too brief, period of music. Whereas artists such as Will Oldham exude a rural sense of space, Damon & Naomi shared spacious similarities but were never so landlocked to a time and place. The songs here shift from the electric guitar silt of 'I'm Yours' to the passionately acoustic (and here, captured live) 'New York City'. Never associated with the by-numbers intimacy of folk music, there was always something overwhelmingly exotic and just out of reach about the songs that made up albums like Playback Singer and …With Ghosts - 'Eye Of The Storm' one example that finds Naomi stoic while guitars swirl ever so aimlessly back and forth around her. Graceful and elegant isn't how you describe the 15 songs here - it's where you start on a journey into music that's hasn't aged at all. Somehow this duo took all that was sonically overwhelming about shoegazing's way of speaking and brought it down to a whisper - all the while injecting an emotive force into their songs that easily eclipsed anything you could do with pedals and amplification. Dream Magazine #10 Damon & Naomi The Sub-Pop Years (20/20/20) A solidly essential fifteen song trip down memory lane for the convert, and a sublime introductory immersion into the earliest recordings of Damon & Naomi for the uninitiated. Some of their classics are here, songs that still flower wildly in their live settings, and songs that they have largely moved-on from as well. As always there are a few choice covers, Tim Hardin's Eulogy to Lenny Bruce, Tim Buckley's sublime Song to the Siren in this case. Naomi sounds so young, and Damon never did, but they both sound great. Backed by Kramer and later members of Japanese band Ghost, this features selections from The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi (1995), Playback Singers (1998), Damon & Naomi with Ghost (2000), and Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian (2002). Evening Telegraph (Peterborough, England) This is a compilation of the band's finest moments drawn from the four albums they put out on the Sub Pop label between 1995 and 2002. Their dreamy ethereal music is a subtle delight. Sometimes their low-fi lullabies are so slow, they seem almost to stop. But that's just your breath being taken away. We all liked Galaxie 500 but Damon and Naomi's solo work is more of an acquired taste; words like "poetic", "ethereal" and "soaring" spring easily to my mind, but equally I admit that some can find it dry and austere. Damon and Naomi shouldn't have existed after More Sad Hits anyway, as they only planned to release one swansong post-G500 record before pursuing other artistic directions (they've run an independent book publishers for the past 20 years while Naomi makes videos and Damon is a published poet).But I'm glad they stuck at it. This compilation compiles tracks from their four Sub Pop albums. It's not a best of (so no 'This Car Climbed Mount Washington') but it does have a wonderfully representative mix. Their solo material draws on their love of Nick Drake and Sandy Denny plus their introspective intelligence (who else would compose a song called 'Judah and the Maccabees' and give it such a swooningly gorgeous chorus?) and is folky, spare, reserved, but heartfelt. Their work with Tokyo band Ghost, and with Ghost's ace guitarist Michio Kurihara feels more elaborate and psychedelic, including a transcendental version of 'Song to the Siren' from the not-live, not-recorded-in-Spain Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian album. Damon and Naomi's work here is soaring and atmospheric, pervaded by a wonderful sense of melancholy and best savoured in a mood of meditation and reflection. Stephin Merritt calls them "probably the quietest rock group in the United States", which is true, but it just means you can better appreciate their lachrymal arrangements. |