Flying Saucer Attack - 'Further' (Drag City)

Right about now feels like the time that Dave Pearce's music is due for a comeback, not that he ever went away, or became unfashionable. He just became less prolific, and seems a million miles away from any sort of music scene politics these days, still making music how he wants and releasing it now and then (the last being the Instrumentals 2015 record which I have not heard yet). I remember reading about Flying Saucer Attack in zines and other pre-Internet media in the early 90s; reading one particular publication, the name of which I can't remember, it seemed (to me) that FSA were aggressive sci-fi space-rock, as they were reviewed alongside more punk-orientated material. My teenage mind couldn't handle that type of diversity yet, because when I finally got around to hearing them (these were the days where one had to struggle to actually hear the things one read about, especially on a high schoolers budget) I was disappointed; it sounded too abstract, too empty to me. Of course that changed later on, once I started to investigate minimalism and drone, and to make my own music which wasn't a million miles away form this sound. Further is probably now the record of theirs I appreciate the most, as it feels like the best balance between all of FSA's various tendencies (folk song vs drone piece, harmony vs dissonance, lo-fi vs hi-fi). Owning it on CD gives it a glassy shimmer, and on a track like 'For Silence', which moves between all of these tendencies, I can only imagine how it must sound coming from vinyl's dynamic range. Acoustic guitars are dominant, and there's quite a lot of arpeggiated picking, making this more obviously folk-based than I was ready for as a teenager. Listening now, I can really hear the saturation in British traditional music, even if 'To The Shore' sounds more like Labradford than Shirley Collins. This reinvention of British folk form was something else totally lost on me not just as a youngster, but later when I discovered and really fell in love with FSA; it's only now that I really feel this is truly the next step in a lineage. Rachel from (the wonderful) Movietone was still a core part of the band here and her voice on 'Still Point' creates a spooky ambience that most directly recalls the strong tonality of the British female voice; that the song is drenched in delay and reverb doesn't inhibit this comparison, but if anything amplifies it. This is music that can be taken in peripherally, as a semi-ambient bouquet of suggestions, or full-on direct into the centre of one's skull. 'In the Light of Time' and 'She is the Daylight' function perhaps as the two anchors of this record, both built around Pearce's earnest voice, over delayed arpeggios, the mildest percussive elements (just tapping the guitar body, I think) and then the bright light tones that drift overtop, like the album artwork rendered into sound. This music has aged very, very well, and the close connection I feel to my physical body when listening to it separates it from that which is based in trends or the cultural context of the time. It's easy to lose oneself in this record, and somehow it feels short even though it's 'proper album length'.