Flying Saucer Attack
Flying Saucer Attack

THE REVIEW

"Are you ready to fly through quantum clouds?
To sail stormy seas of psychedelic equations?
To play with clusters of bits?"

Flying Saucer Attack, or how to reinvent shoegaze and psychedelia. The Flying Saucer is a project by David Pearce (with members including Matt Elliott, Kate Wright, Richard King & Sam Jones, and in the first recordings Rachel Brook) hailing from Bristol, that same Bristol known for trip-hop culture with its downbeat atmospheres, which are instead ripped apart, torn with unprecedented ferocity by a distorted wall of guitars here. From the kraut-rock driven experimentalism in their early singles, Flying Saucer Attack arrived at their first album in 1993 with a self-titled release also known as "Rural Psychedelia" (FSA Records), a vinyl that soon became a cult object among genre enthusiasts. The album would later be released and distributed in the United States by VHF Records.

50 minutes, 50 damn minutes of pure psychedelic madness immersed in an ocean of ear-shredding feedback, a velvety madness caressed by the whispers of David Pearce's voice, home recordings transferred to vinyl that ooze acid, My Bloody Valentine, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Psychedelic jams torn by the metallic screams of guitars in a drunken vortex of despair and perdition in the most absolute nothingness, a deviant, deviating album that accompanies on an unrepeatable journey. 

"My Dreaming Hill" voids, every thought is useless, delays action, a slow, inexorable action making its way through that intricate wall of feedback while words, like distant jolts, hurl nothingness at you, "A Silent Tide" now in the void we search for a handhold, but that distant voice covered by distortions pushes us back down where we ended up exhausted and powerless, "Moonset" a stunned gaze immersed in a rhythm of ancestral percussion while far away our soul screams and thrashes about. In "Make me dream" and "Wish" the struggle becomes more intense, and in that hell of feedback no rest is visible, only madness, only pain, then "Popol Vuh 2" where the atmospheres calm down, become soft, confused but delicate, almost as if someone were reaching out a friendly hand to save you from that abyss, but it's simply a sweet illusion because that hand doesn't exist, we are in the nothingness of our mind, the distortions continue to hurt, and "The Drowners" (a crazily inspired cover of Suede among others) and the brief "Still" sadistically prolong our agony. Exhausted, destroyed, perhaps dead, we wake up in the calm of "Popul Vuh 1", echoes and reverbs of a warm and reassuring sound over which emerges that ancestral rhythm that now embraces us and carries us towards the light, towards the end of the abyss, towards the arpeggio of "The Season Is Ours" where we finally open our eyes.

A rotten, moody album, unique in its experimental nature in drawing new vital energy from more established movements like shoegaze to create enveloping and fascinating lysergic atmospheres. An alienating post-rock years light away from the schemes imposed by subsequent bands yet capable of kidnapping the listener like few other things in this filthy world. If you love to get lost in the mazes of your brain, assuming you have one, then this is the ALBUM you must listen to.