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.
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