Flying Saucer Attack
Instrumentals 2015
DRAG CITY
7/10
David Pearce is solely responsible for Flying Saucer Attack’s masterful run of records, from 1994’s self-titled album to 2000’s Mirror. FSA—alongside bands like Amp, Bark Psychosis, and Windy & Carl—created a freer, more experimental subdivision of dreamy shoegaze bliss. Pearce’s self-defined “rural psychedelia” fused tape manipulations and lo-fi melodic experiments together with interspersed scorching sonic blowouts. Never overly popular, FSA’s home-taping ethos and nonexistent public presence relegated them to forever exist in cult status.
Then, with the force of mighty Godzilla rising out of the Pacific, Flying Saucer Attack suddenly reemerged with a new album—their first in fifteen years. Instrumentals 2015 is a stunningly cohesive album full of guitar pieces that walk the line between pure white noise and haunted drones. The notes you can pick out ring and reverberate like the charred leftovers of a British folk record, but this is, largely, pure in-the-zone heaviness. It may be the most welcomed and least compromised, least diminished return of a ’90s act since…well, ever.
