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FLYING SAUCER ATTACK

Post Rock/Math rock • United Kingdom


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Flying Saucer Attack picture
Flying Saucer Attack biography
FLYING SAUCER ATTACK was formed in 1993, in Bristol, England by David Pearce, and Rachel Brook. Formerly from LYNDA'S STRANGE VACATION, FLYING SAUCER ATTACK was formed from an interest in other experimentation outside of the band. Heavily influenced by Krautrock and other noisy ventures, the first album was a dense and textured work. These atmospheric albums have continued up to today. The band is very elusive and very innovative in today's experimental works.

The group's best recordings are the debut "Flying Saucer Attack", the sophomore effort "Further" and the 1997 release "New Lands".

Anyone interested in the new experimental scene and new prog innovations, similar to the likes of GODSPEED, YOU BLACK EMPEROR! and any space rock groups should enjoy FLYING SAUCER ATTACK.


Why this artist must be listed in www.progarchives.com :
Innovative Experimental/Post Rock and Space Rock group of today's age.


Discography:
MAJOR RELEASES:
Flying Saucer Attack (1994)
Further (1995)
Distant Station (1996)
Goodbye/And Goodbye/Whole Day (1997)
New Lands (1997)
Mirror (2000)

LIVE:
In Search of Spaces [live] (1996)

COMPILATIONS:
Distance (1994)
Chorus (1996)

SINGLES & EP'S:
Beach Red Lullaby/Second Hour (1995)
Outdoor Miner/Psychic Driving (1995)
Sally Free & Easy (1996)

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Videos (YouTube and more)


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FLYING SAUCER ATTACK discography


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FLYING SAUCER ATTACK top albums (CD, LP, MC, SACD, DVD-A, Digital Media Download)

3.06 | 9 ratings
Flying Saucer Attack
1994
3.32 | 9 ratings
Further
1995
4.50 | 2 ratings
Distant Station
1996
3.33 | 3 ratings
Goodbye/And Goodbye/Whole Day
1997
4.00 | 3 ratings
New Lands
1997
3.00 | 3 ratings
Mirror
2000

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Live Albums (CD, LP, MC, SACD, DVD-A, Digital Media Download)

4.00 | 1 ratings
In Search of Spaces
1996

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Videos (DVD, Blu-ray, VHS etc)

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Boxset & Compilations (CD, LP, MC, SACD, DVD-A, Digital Media Download)

4.00 | 2 ratings
Distance
1994
2.00 | 2 ratings
Chorus
1996

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Official Singles, EPs, Fan Club & Promo (CD, EP/LP, MC, Digital Media Download)

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK Reviews


Showing last 10 reviews only
 Flying Saucer Attack by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1994
3.06 | 9 ratings

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Flying Saucer Attack
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by LearsFool
Prog Reviewer

5 stars It's more shoegaze than post, and needs to tunnel through walls of sound to get to the really interesting and best tracks, but perfection is perfection. The best way to describe the album is almost track-by-track: the first four plunge into a dense mire of wailing, fuzzy shoegaze guitars, with the post guitar sounding off in the background as our vocalist sings softly and beautifully from what seems the middle of the wall. It almost seems as if it's going to be a 3.5 star album of nothing but this bliss, but then "Wish" comes along and they expand their sound. The walls only return for "The Drowners" and "Still", leaving track five and "The Season Is Ours" to find prettiness in minimalism much like Talk Talk, the latter also using the shoegaze style for a guitar that doesn't overpower. And then there's the two tracks named for Popol Vuh, sprawling, atmospheric cuts very much inspired by them, pulling out keys for a third kind of beauty. What pulls it all together is how the tracks are sequenced, making the progression from each feel natural. A diverse and particularly modern kind of psychedelic goodness, simply stellar.
 Further by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1995
3.32 | 9 ratings

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Further
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by Prog Sothoth
Collaborator Honorary Collaborator

4 stars Flying Saucer Attack's Further combines borderline abrasive sheets of drone and guitar feedback with delicate folk melodies and soft, echoey vocals, forming haunting tunes that evoke a disorienting and vast atmosphere. It's like being lost on some barren breezy landscape at dusk.

The album begins with "Rainstorm Blues", an eerie instrumental that practically sounds like flying saucers hovering over some field deciding what sort of crop circles to make as a storm gathers in the distance. The vocal tracks follow, and this combination of gentle melodies swathed in blankets of din create this shoegaze effect that heightens the sense of isolation provided by the dreamy, detached singing of David Pearce. Co-member Rachel Brook gets her own spacey vocal showcase for "Still Point", resulting anan even dreamier track than the norm regarding this album. There's also the long instrumental "To the Shore" that's like some psychedelic journey across rocky shorelines draped with fog.

Yes I'm throwing in lots of landscape metaphors here simply because that's the sort of sonic impression I get from this. The levels of noise never get too jarring or violent, but this certainly isn't the kind of stuff you'd hear at The Newport Folk Festival or something. The production may have been recorded in a lo-fi manner, but it still sounds quite excellent with a wide scope-like effect.

Predating much of post-rock and the whole 'blackgaze' scene, it could be seen as an influence on both, although this group generally flew under the radar like flying saucers tend to do themselves, so maybe it's just more of a coincidence that this album contains obvious attributes utilized so thoroughly by later acts. Either way, just zone out and enjoy the waves.

 Further by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1995
3.32 | 9 ratings

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Further
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by tragiclifestories

5 stars It took me a couple of goes to get into FSA. Dave Pearce does rather like to scare you off - anybody who heard his cover of Wire's Outdoor Miner, most recently anthologised on that Domino Records sampler, will have found themselves wondering exactly whose bright idea it was to filter out the entire low end, leaving some guitar noise, hi-hats and not much more than the breath on Dave's vocals.

The formula for Further is quite simple - pastoral melancholy on acoustic guitar meets great sweeping washes of guitar feedback. A veritable orgy of psychedelic loveliness ensues. There are variations - opener Rainstorm Blues just has the feedback, plus a bit of unidentified rustling; various sections of the longer tracks strip back much of the noise. The genius is in the details. At times the washes are gentle and harmonic, euphoric in that way that Sigur Ros have made famous with their cavernous reverbs and e-bows. On Here Am I, however, it gets noisier and noisier, and is ultimately distinctly unnerving and physically uncomfortable at the moment it cuts off suddenly.

There's not much more to describe, really. It's worth noting that, in spite of no particular change in Pearce's working methods (ie, everything is still done in his house near Bristol on a cheap four-track), this is a fantastic sounding record. Unlike that Wire cover, there is bass. When everything's going full blast, there's no frequency range left unexplored. There's a real total feel to it - if you were going to have a religious experience, there would be far worse platters to stick on while doing so.

Absolutely magnificent.

 Further by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1995
3.32 | 9 ratings

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Further
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by ClemofNazareth
Special Collaborator Prog Folk Researcher

1 stars Well this is my second Flying Saucer Attack album. The first I have an excuse for since I found it in a used record store and had no idea what I was getting into. This time is my own fault since I did know what they sounded like but still didn’t resist buying this in another used record store almost a decade later. My bad.

I guess this one isn’t as horrible as the debut, which is just gawd-awful acoustic-and- feedback tripe scratched onto four tape tracks with a dull fingernail or broken glass or something. Truly dreadful.

This one isn’t that bad, but it’s nothing I’d go out of my way to try and find. There’s some acoustic guitar, some electric guitar feedback, some poorly-done sound effects, and occasional vocals that are kind of like a flat Bryan-Ferry-meets-that-guy-from- Icehouse (for some reason every time I hear a slightly-bored, slightly-creepy, mostly- dull male vocal set to bad prog music I can’t resist comparing it to Icehouse – now that was some terrible music!).

The production quality is somewhat better this time around, and I guess the girl that was in the ‘band’ is gone so it’s back to being a solo act again. Hard to make a relationship work on bad post-rock and sonic feedback alone, I suppose.

So anyway, the songs are all about the same: some slow and fairly mild (usually acoustic) guitar lead-in; slowly building and phasing in feedback to a point where that’s all you can hear; maybe a few cheap sound-effects like wrinkled tin foil to simulate rain; then some sort of disjointed ending. Sounds like this is all done on four tracks like the first one was. Pretty sparse in the artwork and packaging too. “To the Shore” sounds like at least an attempt at something more complex, but ends up dragging on too long with an endless guitar repetition regardless. The only mildly interesting tracks are “Come and Close my Eyes” with an acoustic back line that persists and kind of gives the composition some grounding; and “Still Point”, where the vocalist manages to appear at least interested for a couple minutes. The rest is completely forgettable. This is not some hidden gem; it's just obscure because it deserves to be.

I’m sure this is a nice guy, or at least I don’t have any reason to think he isn’t anyway. But this music is incredibly simple, undeveloped, and unimaginative. I think he’s just sitting in his apartment with a tape machine and a couple pedals and moping about his girlfriend the bass player leaving him. Get over it dude. One star.

peace

 Flying Saucer Attack by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1994
3.06 | 9 ratings

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Flying Saucer Attack
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by ClemofNazareth
Special Collaborator Prog Folk Researcher

1 stars I picked this album up from a used-record store in the Mojave Desert several years ago. It long ago became scratched and unplayable, but back then I was committing all my albums to tape so I could listen to them in my car, so I still have that. As I recall my copy of the album was a bit different – it was a blue vinyl record with a plain white label. Maybe it was a demo version, and I’m not sure how it ended up all the way in the desert in southern California (this is a British act on an indy label), but it struck me as interesting at the time.

The first disclaimer about this album is that the production quality is absolutely horrible. Now granted, the musical style is experimental/post-rock, and this band seems to center all of their work around sonic feedback anyway, so some of this is to be expected. But even with that considered, the quality is very poor. This was almost certainly recorded on four tracks, so with one for overdubbing drums plus the vocals (which are pretty much unintelligable), that doesn’t leave much room for separation of sound, and the left speaker of my stereo pretty much sounds like it’s blown whenever I play this record (which isn’t very often). It reminds me very much of so many of the other independent label thrash/grunge/punk band recordings that were so prevalent in the mid-90s, and has the same lack of recognizable timing, tempo, or conscious arrangement.

There’s not much to say about the album beyond that. The song structures are fairly simple, and mostly all the same: intro, short monotone vocal verse, sonic feedback. That’s about it. A couple songs like “Popol Vuh 2” have extended drum-track/whining keyboard stretches that I suppose are meant to set some sort of eerie or introspective mood, but it’s very hard to get past the poor quality of the recording, and I invariably shut it off before getting through the whole album in one setting. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever managed to get all the way through it without at least one break.

There aren’t any credits to speak off on the album liner, but I looked the band up and apparently this is pretty much a man (David Pearce) and his 4-track soundboard. There was a girl who played bass some (Rachel Brook), but apparently that relationship didn’t work out and she wasn’t around long. I can’t find too much evidence of any kind of regular touring schedule or even a reliable web site, and considering it’s been more than half a decade since the last recording, I think it’s safe to sat these guys aren’t around anymore.

So unless you are really into poorly produced guitar and keyboard feedback channeled through four tracks, I would avoid these guys, or at least this album.

One star.

peace

 New Lands by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1997
4.00 | 3 ratings

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New Lands
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by Heptade
Prog Reviewer

4 stars This is one of the most progressive albums on this site. Most advances in music since 1980 have been technological rather than stylistic, in my opinion, the growth of guitar effects being one of the most important technological developments. Flying Saucer Attack uses the guitar and it's various sonic accessories to create entire soundscapes, not like Robert Fripp, but by constructing shorter songs in which almost all of the sounds are made by guitar, melody, feedback and percussive throbbing. The songs themselves are fairly conventional in construction, but the way they are drenched in outlandish guitar noise is definitely unique, well beyond other much-lauded noise rock type bands like My Bloody Valentine. The singer's voice is hushed, almost a whisper, buried in the mix. Earlier FSA recordings featured a lot of acoustic songs, but this album is all about the electric guitar. New Lands, indeed. I'm surprised that FSA never got more critical attention. If you are an adventurous post rock listener or lover of psychedelia, you really need to hear this.
 Further by FLYING SAUCER ATTACK album cover Studio Album, 1995
3.32 | 9 ratings

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Further
Flying Saucer Attack Post Rock/Math rock

Review by Heptade
Prog Reviewer

4 stars I'm very happy to see FSA here. If you are into psych-folk, you will go crazy for this album. What it is is a collection of trippy acoustic songs on pastoral themes sung in a sleepy voice that sound like they were recorded on a four-track. Then layers of guitar noise and feedback are added over top to make one of the most brain-numbing experiences you can have. It really is something. Some later albums dropped the acoustic folk thing for an entirely electric sound. There are also a couple of guitar-noise instrumentals ("Rainstorm Blues"). FSA really demonstrated what could be done sonically with just a guitar and a couple of pedals...amazing stuff. But if you are offended by feedback, stay away. If you are adventurous and like psychedelia or acid-folk, you will love this.
Thanks to Retrovertigo for the artist addition. and to easy livin for the last updates

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