Flying Saucer Attack - Further (1995)

Buying an album purely on the strength of its cover seems like a notion from another age now everything is so easily accessible.

Back in the pre-internet twilight, taking a punt on something you'd vaguely heard of - did a friend recommend this? Did I read this name in the NME? Perhaps John Peel mentioned them in passing the other week? - wasn't such a strange idea, particularly if the artwork stood out.

Flying Saucer Attack's Further caught my eye in Piccadilly Records when it came out in 1995. Had someone tapped me on the shoulder and informed me that FSA were a pair of Bristolian shoegazers then I probably would have slipped it back in the racks and gone on my way.

Thankfully, there was no helpful voice to hand and I stood intrigued by the picture of what looks to be a long exposure of a milky moon shot through winter trees. The sun features on the back, sinking into the sea on a rocky beach as clouds roll overhead.

Flip open the gatefold sleeve and there's a becalmed light blue sea almost indistinguishable from the cloud covered sky above. It's reminiscent of the handful of strange, blank seascapes that LS Lowry painted, seemingly intent on proving himself the anti-JWM Turner.

The only writing on the whole thing, bar the spine, is the name of the band and album on the back cover in a deliberately unexciting helvetica font.

In the highly unlikely event that The Wire magazine ever asked me to contribute to their regular feature when people talk about their favourite album cover art then this is what I'd go for.

Not only because the artwork is intriguing, atmospheric and mysterious but also because it brilliantly captures the mood of what lies in the grooves within.

Whispered vocals and sheets of feedback courtesy of David Pearce and Rachel Brook saw them lumped in with the tailend of the shoegaze scene but in truth this was only part of the story. There's a blissful ambient swell to most of the songs that seems touched by Eno's best work and traces of a bucolic folkiness.

Pearce credited Popul Vuh as a major influence, particularly 1971's epic In den Garten Pharaos.

Krautrock and folk may be all the rage nowadays but back in 1995 the former was the preserve of prog fans and latter that of elderly real ale drinkers and earnest lefties.

Just to underline how out of step with the times they were, CD versions of FSA's stuff would carry the legend 'CDs destroy music'.

Which leaves you wondering why FSA haven't been rediscovered. Even shoegaze, so enthusiastically buried by the music press in the mid-1990s as grunge slouched into view, has enjoyed a revival as nu-gaze in the States and heavily influenced the likes of Ulrich Schnauss and Fennesz.

Mind you, FSA were really a post-rock outfit rather than shoegazers. The likes of Chapterhouse, Ride, Lush and Moose were all in love with classic 60/70s songwriting but just smothered it with a vast overdriven guitar sound inspired by the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.

Pearce's influences were rather more exotic, as their 1996 cover of Pentangle's Sally Free And Easy underlined.

A more conventionally fuzzed up cover of Suede's The Drowners on their 1993 self-titled debut album seemed to earn FSA the shoegaze tag that Further should have shaken off but somehow didn't.

There's little in the way of classic songwriting left here, just a huge oceanic swell of sound that builds to an almighty racket at times, particularly on the abrasive Here I Am or the steady build of For Silence.

Other songs are beautifully soothing, gentle lo-fi acoustic guitar lapping against slow guitar drones and echo-drenched dreamy vocals. In The Time Of Light, Come And Close My Eyes and She Is The Daylight all manage to combine pastoral and blissful sounds with the ambience of having been recorded in the cellar of a haunted house in the early hours. With the lights off.

Side one ends with Still Point, Brook's only vocal turn sounding even more distant and diffident than Pearce.

Side two is dominated by the 12-minute To The Shore, a curious krautrock-indebted confection that starts with the ominous bongs of a gong and features several songs sliced together, including excerts of the band playing live. The cover images and song titles may be firmly earth-bound but the sound here is purely cosmic/kosmiche.

After a burst of four albums in two years, FSA steadily ran out of steam, attempting to trade their psychedelic folkie wall of noise for a more rhythm based approach with only partial success.

Brook left to focus on her other band Movietone at the end of 1995 and Pearce steadily slipped out of view - but Further remains a fine legacy worth seeking out.

Shortly after Further came out, Pearce told an interviewer: "Records are your friends. You can look at the song you're hearing, it's physically there in the spirally groove." I salute you, sir, wherever you may be.

Spacemen 3/Wooden Shjips - split 7-inch single (2010)

Having written about the first single I ever bought last time out, this is the most recent - and it's definitely the stuff of vinyl geek dreams.

A limited edition red vinyl single featuring previously unreleased Spacemen 3 material with artwork drawn by an original member of the band plus a cover of one of their finest tunes by San Francisco freaks Wooden Shjips thrown in for good measure. Not exactly a steal at nine quid but who needs new socks when there's this to buy?

Split singles are about as indie as it gets - a show of comradeship and a treat for the fans - not to mention a good way to get a bit more cash over the merch desk on a tour. Oasis would never have bothered with a split single. Too small time.

Mind you, Metallica and Black Sabbath put one out together in April to celebrate Record Store Day, so it would seem all things are possible.

This is actually the second Spacemen 3 split single I've got, the previous one coming free with a fanzine in 1990, with the Spacemen and Mudhoney covering each other's songs to great effect.

The 'new' Spacemen track here is labelled Big City (demo) and though it certainly went on to become the track of that name, this version must have been called something different when it was recorded as the chorus is nowhere to be heard.

The burbling synths are in place but sound more inspired by The Silver Apples, Suicide or Kraftwerk than anything being played in dance clubs of the time, while the heavily phased guitar lines are present and correct as Pete Kember once again manages to make an asset of his limited skills.

But the melody and lyrics are totally different and the song starts with a spoken intro similar to Let Me Down Gently from 1989's Playing With Fire album. Like several of Kember's songs from this period, it's not clear if it's about a girl or about his fellow Spaceman Jason Pierce.

The band was crumbling at this stage, with 1991's final album, Recurring, basically two solo albums glued together, with Kember and Pierce only playing together on one song (Mudhoney's When Tomorrow Hits, from the previous mentioned fanzine vinyl, which had already come out a year earlier and predated the album sessions).

'I felt so tied up/And I wanted to be free/And I wanted to be you/And I wanted you to be me/Yes, I was blind and I thought I could see/And I'm sorry I'm not what you needed me to be'. Make of that what you will.

It's not hard to see why Kember decided to have a rethink, taking the song in an entirely new direction apparently inspired by attending a particularly druggy Happy Mondays gig and his own experiments with ecstacy.

Giving the synth line a techno sheen and ditching the original bummer lyrics for lines such as 'All of my friends can be found here', 'Let the good times roll' and the final bliss-struck pay off of 'Waves of joy/ Yeah, I love you too' took Big City out of the bedroom and down to the disco. Of course, this being Spacemen 3, it still sounded to slow and stoned to actually work on the dance floor but it was fascinating to hear Kember absorbing the sounds of the era into his usual esoteric stew of influences.

The final version may be superior but this is still a charming work in progress, with its clear links to the Playing With Fire era.

On the flip side is Wooden Shjips version of I Believe It, originally a gospel-inspired devotional drone from Playing With Fire that's dominated by keyboards and features Kember at his most wide eyed and awe struck.

The Shjips take it to the garage and swathe it in fuzz guitar while Ripley Johnson rolls out a bluesy psych solo that owes more to Pierce than Kember.

I must confess to being in two minds about the Shjips. At times, particular the Volume One compilation of early singles, they seem utterly inspired with their endlessly refracting motorik boogie. But at other times, they strike me as absurdly stunted, locked in by a limited palate and chugging endless round in addled circles.

But I Believe It finds them at their best, with Johnson's echo-drenched whisper suiting the lyric just as well as Kember's rather more committed original version did and the Shjips managing to draw on the Spacemen's Perfect Prescription era sound to breathe fresh life into the song.

With Kember and Pierce seemingly no nearer to settling their differences than when the Spacemen finally split in 1991, this two-song morsel is a fine reminder of what a great band they were.

Fans of Big City may also find this Erol Alkan remix of interest.