On The Turntable: Flying Saucer Attack March 17 2017
Dave Pearce began his adventures in homespun shoegaze / drone-rock releases back in 1993 under the moniker Flying Saucer Attack with a series of releases on his own FSA Records, based out of Bristol, England.
The eponymous record is alternately titled "Rural Psychedelia" given that charmed epithet graced the back cover of the album. Pearce and company alternate between two complementary songwriting strategies. The more explosive and intense tracks build around the primordial post-VU drone-rock minimalism with surges of Jesus And Mary Chain blasts of noise that punctuate the chorus or a chord change. The iconic "My Dreaming Hill" and the outstanding cover the Suede's "The Drowners" belong to this camp of cracked art-drone-pop genius. In their more exploratory guise, FSA will set forth long drifts of tranced-out feedback and cavernous guitar drone with hypnotic rhythms that look back to the transcendent works of Amon Duul's first hippie incarnation and the Popol Vuh soundtracks. In fact two of these tracks give direct nods in the instrumental tracks "Popol Vuh 1" and "Popol Vuh 2." Still sounds so goddamn good after all these years.
Distance was first compiled back in 1994 as a collection of five tracks from the first three FSA singles with three tracks recorded during those same sessions. Those early self-published singles had quickly gone out of print, making this a necessity. These tracks follow the same dual track course laid down on the first record, with ungrounded echoplex bleariness set next to noise pop liberated through blown out Xpressway grit and shambolic radioluminescence. The punk throttle basslines that Rachel Brook gives to the FSA probably don't get due credit for providing the urgency for tracks like "Standing Stone" and "Soaring High," but these two tracks in particular highlight her influence on the FSA sound. It's still Pearce's chiming hypno-drone guitar that is center stage, dripping with a deep British folk melancholy that has been hot-wired and fried through a drugged-out noise not even Spacemen 3 had dreamed of.
First-time domestic release of these stellar albums on vinyl.
