Flying Saucer Attack: Classic or Dud?

xpost. That Clear Horizon album is pretty much of a piece with the Flying Saucer Attack stuff, and it's *very* good. I've mentioned it in a few other threads: seems to have gotten completely overlooked because nobody knew who it was.

"xpost-that's the US (Drag City) cover."

i never knew there were different covers! never hurts to sell the yanks a little razamataz.

Trip Maker and others on this thread...thanks! I have long been an enthusiast of some unholy trinity or quadrernity or whatever of U.S. west coast bands influenced by F.S.A. (it's not too difficult to guess the suspects), but for whatever reason, I've never properly delved into Flying Saucer Attack's catalog. Gratzi for the recommendations and erudition.

Now I need to head over to the Dr. Savannah's Buzzard blah-blah Band thread to express thanks for turning me on to that stuff.

'tis the season.

U.S. west coast bands influenced by F.S.A. (it's not too difficult to guess the suspects)

Aptly phrased.

ha, yeah. 'nuff said.

I second Clear Horizon. Very good album.

I think Movietone is still together, aren't they? I seem to recall they released an album a couple of years back. I love their s/t debut, but I didn't really get into the follow-ups.

picked this up the other week, 'tis pretty immersive:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:anfexqyhldfe

(let's try that again...)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21AMBVPGRFL._SL500_AA130_.jpg

yeah, that's not my fave. i hardly ever played it. not like their other stuff. but it does have a fab cover.

maria and i have a new three hour sound collage/musique concrete/fx/cut & paste & loop radio show on her radio station and i was creating material for it and i played some FSA at 45 RPM and it sounded great! like they become the greatest shoegaze band ever and dude's vocals become MBV girly and cool. i could even see listening to a whole album like that. i was impressed by this totally new band i was listening to.

the ones that really blow me away are Further and the 1st S/T one aka Rural Psychedelia. Chorus is good in parts but I remember it being kinda inconsistent since is is a singles comp. New Lands seemed like a failed extension of the formula and I was even less enthusiastic about Mirror or whatever that was called.

I also really like the later singles - Sally Free And Easy, Coming Home, and the Roy Montgomery collab.

Was just reading a good interview with Dave in Popwatch #9, I wish there were still magazines like that.

oh also the Corpus Hermeticum CD is a very different kind of beast but well worth tracking down (on MP3, I doubt it's in print). Kind of like Neil Young's Arc as applied to FSA.

further is my fave. fave cover too

http://detour-mag.com/assets/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/flyingsaucerattack.jpg

then new lands and then chorus probably. as far as faves. i need a copy of the first album. don't have one on vinyl.

picked this up the other week, 'tis pretty immersive:

Oh gee, I wonder who reviewed it.

Further is the greatest, of theirs. For any other band Rainstorm Blues would been a stupid title, but they pull even that one off

yeah any of rural psychedelia, distance, and further is wonderful. i love chorus too but it's not up to the other three. i've never heard mirror, also i think i'm one of the few who love savage pencil's cover art for it

no people think it's groovy. Though i'd hardly call them groovy, the Further cover is a perfect match as far as their sounds concerned

damn I forgot about Distance, looking at my copy of that and Chorus it seems they both have singles on them. I'm putting these on RIGHT NOW.

OK I'm leaning towards Chorus as being a tad better than Distance, but I should really listen to these like five more times. As I recall Distance has the earlier singles, Chorus is seeming more developed and assured to me. And "Feedback Song" is a real highlight.

so in order:

Soaring High/Standing Stone 7" (on Distance)
Wish/Oceans 7" (on Distance but w/instrumental Wish)
1st LP
Crystal Shade/Distance 7" (on Distance)
Land Beyond The Sun/Everywhere Was Everything 7" (never heard this!)
Beach Red Lullaby/Second Hour 7" (on Chorus)
Further LP
Outdoor Miner EP
Chorus LP (includes Peel session, comp track and 7" above plus more)
At Night split 7" with Jessamine (haven't heard this either)
In Search Of Spaces CD
Tele:Funken LP
Sally Free And Easy
"Since When" suite on Harmony Of The Spheres (I like this a lot)
collab w/Roy Montgomery
New Lands
Coming Home/Hope
Mirror

so Chorus is kind of a patchwork whereas Distance is more a proper singles comp. Much more discog info HERE.

cover of "outdoor miner" may be better than wire original. ain't easy to pull that off

Land Beyond The Sun/Everywhere Was Everything 7" (never heard this!)

you should def hear this, it's among their best IMO. the track on the jessamine split is good but quite FSA-by-numbers at the time it came out

there's also a track on an Enraptured 4-band ep that's again good but not among their best tracks

there's also an earworm demos 45 of land beyond the sun (under the name of jon + dave) which is an interesting take on the track..

i'm wondering what people might think of fsa in comparison to sun dial. it seems at times they were both going for the same thing, albeit fsa more ethereally and sun dial more garagey. and while i'm mumbling tangentials, i might as well rep for the first self-titled album by movietone, rachel brook's band after she split from fsa. for my money, that debut album is as good as anything fsa ever did

ah, you see my opinion of movietone is very much less positive than that. and then some.

youshallknowourdiscography had all of the singles ripped and available at his site some time back. probably still available. i love Movietone but I think that their first record is the weakest one.

ah, my opinion of movietone is not all that positive, except for that first album. that one haunts me, the way they establish that woozy groove in the first song and then keeping working it until the last track dissolves into mist and fog. sublime. but after that one, i have no use for them

I hardly ever listen to Movietone but I find it very rewarding when I do

Oh gee, I wonder who reviewed it.

Surprise surprise. Nice review, Ned.

i'm wondering what people might think of fsa in comparison to sun dial.

If memory serves, both bands sort of became careers by accident. I think FSA was just going to release some singles and then kinda got carried away by the momentum. Sun Dial though is clearly looking towards the late-80s era of acid rock with Bevis Frond, High Rise, and fellow travelers who had the Fun With Mushrooms comp and some issues of Ptolemaic Terrascope.

I always thought of FSA as an out-of-time post-punk band - very much a pop band (or at least with pop sensibilities) but inverted and deconstructed all to hell. Pearce could have just as easily been working in 1981 or 1994.

Maybe FSA and Gary Ramon's Quad albums?

I think the first Movietone record is actually the best, mostly because of the first side. "Chance is Her Opera" is pretty much one of my favorite songs ever. Their other albums are good, but feel a bit formulaic to me in the sense that they hit the Movietone sound and stuck with it. Maybe I should give them another listen though.

The thing that I appreciate most about FSA is how it was so prescient of what happened in music ten years later. Not that I believe that there is this eschatological notion of progress in music by any means, but the approach they took with home recording and the psych-folk sound were not that popular then. There was the whole krautrock revival thing going on, but most people were lifting from Neu! and Can, not Popol Vuh and Amon Duul. I feel like they don't get enough credit as being a major influence on the psych-folk revival of the 00s.

Definitely agreed on the last point, they had to have been a gateway drug for a lot of folks.

i'm just hearing fsa for the first time
"at night" is amazing!!

@Scott Seward

What album did you play on 45? I'm very curious about this!

For me the best FSA's are Further and New Lands (I feel the latter is being ignored way too much!).

New Lands is my favourite FSA album. But I didn't much care for Further.

(hell, I suddenly seem to remember it was actually Elvis Telecom (Chr1ss right?) who got me into FSA in the first place, via recommendation on the DroneOn mailing list, ages ago!)

(hell, I suddenly seem to remember it was actually Elvis Telecom (Chr1ss right?)

Yup!

There's not one particular stand out FSA album that I reach for more than the others. I have a vague nostalgia trip for the first self-titled LP. I first heard it in '93 at a friend's place in SF - typical winter fog outside and side 2 just made the whole setting work out. The week after that, I found the LP at Noise Noise Noise with the description "Hot New Something" on the shrink-wrap (still kept that part of the shrink-wrap intact because of the description)

My main FSA memory goes like this: It was 2am. I'm driving somewhere NW of Lakehurst, New Jersey because I wanted to see where the Hindenburg crashed and I'm trying to find the I-95 turnpike. There's a major rain/sleet storm going on (worst I've ever tried to drive through) and I'm the only car on a road filled with trucks (all of whom see nothing wrong with driving full-speed through a Major Fuck Off Storm Of Doom). I needed something to keep me going and the first thing I grabbed was a live FSA tape from some early 1993 gig in Bristol. Hadn't listened to it yet so I didn't know what I was getting into. No songs but one long drone out that begins similarly to one of the "Popul Vuh" instrumentals that winds out into a mammoth space/time/metal-tearing Something both terrifying and awe-inspiring - sorta like viewing a slow-motion asteroid impact that takes a hour to complete. I did eventually make it to Connecticut where I finally passed out in a hotel room, but I was convinced that I was going to be killed by a truck, killed by the road spray thrown up by a truck, or would suffer the worst case of missing time ever and eventually wake up at the city limits of Rapid City, South Dakota.

Heavy stuff. I can understand why people were so pissed by Jim O'Rourke's clown joke at Terrastock I.

Oh god, the clown joke. The legend.

For a long time, my favourite FSA album was "Further" ... I found their poppier stuff to be hit-and-miss (although when they "hit", they *really* hit, e.g. "Outdoor Miner" or "My Dreaming Hill") but "Further" is the most focused of their drone-y records, if that makes any sense (the jams are consistently reigned into 5-6 minute run times and therefore they cut out before they have a chance to overstay their welcome).

But over the past couple of years, I've re-evaluated "New Lands". This was a rare case in which I really liked an album (it was in my year-end top ten list for 1999), didn't listen to it for a while (a few years), and came back to it to find a *completely* different album than what I remembered. My initial reaction was "I liked THIS in 1999??" because it was way out of step with what I had been listening to at the time. I could barely recall exactly what I liked about it in 1999, but I knew that they weren't the same things I was hearing and newly appreciating from c.2005-now. It was like hearing a great album for the first time ... all over again!

So "New Lands" is my favourite now. Nothing seems to happen on this album -- there aren't any memorable melodies that stick with you once it finishes playing, and all the tracks blend together as if thrown into a noisy, hissing melting pot -- but more than any other FSA album, it's more about the mood than the melody, like being huddled indoors, waiting out a storm that's blowing past your house, and being somewhat relieved when it finally passes by.

What's the clown joke?

FSA's Dave Pearce came to Terrastock for his first U.S. performance, but none of his usual collaborators made the trip. Instead, he was backed by Chicagoan Jim O'Rourke, who overpowered Pearce's gentle picking with his white-noise guitar, and ruined the vibe by telling a dumb and seemingly endless joke midway through the set.

http://articles.citypages.com/1997-05-14/music/psychedelic-revival/

Is there a clown joke transcript someplace?

Here's one version:

Where I come from (West Linn, OR) the Clown Joke is told slightly differently. It is about a man named Bob who is a bum. Bob the bum has always wanted to go to the circus, but he, being a bum in a long line of bums, has never been able to afford it. Finally one night a group of Bob's friends (other bums) see that the circus is in town and pool their collected change in order buy a circus ticket and out of crude asshole humor decide to go without Bob who is passed out in an alley. (Hey, they're bums what do you expect.) So then they come back laughing like middle school girls and when Bob asks what's up, they let him know what they did and told him how great the circus was. Bob, seeing one of his own precious life dreams being ridiculed by those he once thought his only friends and family, gets extremely angry and being unable to cope with his anger drinks himself into oblivious and passes out in an alley (Hey, he's a bum.)

Well the next day Bob has to come to terms with his life and the cruel world he lives in. He decides the only way he can live with himself is to show everyone who has doubted him and achieve his dream - going to the circus. So Bob cleans himself up and 20 minutes of narrative later, Bob has purchased a ticket to next years circus and is inside.

So Bob watches the circus and it is fabulous! He loves every minute of it. And finally the final act everyone has been waiting for - The Clown! The crowd goes silent as The Clown steps into the ring and asks for a volunteer. The spotlight zooms over the crowd and finally lands on one man, Bob. Bob stands up, in a slight haze of joy.
The Clown then asks him,"Sir, are you a horse's hoof?"
Bob (smile on face): No.
Clown: "Sir, are you a horse's head?"
Bob (Pause): No.
Clown: "Then you sir - must be --, --, a Horses ASS!!" (Now teller of joke has to immediately move on so audience doesn't think this is the punchline.)

So the crowd bursts out laughing. Parents, kids, circus freaks, everyone is standing and laughing at Bob. Needless to say - Bob is pissed! He finally achieved something and actually worked for it (Important since he is from a family of bums) and now it is thrown back in his face. More story is narrated, and once again Bob passes out in an alley. (He's a bum, remember?)

So then next morning Bob wakes up and decides the only way to live with himself is to get even with that clown - to redeem himself by enacting the ultimate form of revenge upon the clown which hurt him so. To further this end Bob gets more jobs, enrolls in martial arts and once a master of the physical realm enrolls in insult school where he learns all different forms of insults in every culture and for every occasion - including the very special art of Comebackery.

Narration continues for a minimum of 20 minutes describing all the steps Bob takes and how Bob begins to formulate a plan for ultimate revenge on the clown. During this time Bob has worked himself off the streets and his hatred burning within him has driven him to success in other areas. Finally it is time for the circus again. Bob has the first ticket and is first in the tent. He now meditates, going over his plan for ultimate revenge in careful detail in his head - over and over. The circus acts go by in a flash for meditating Bob and finally The Clown steps out. The crowd is excited - full of energy. Here is The Clown. The Clown asks for a volunteer. Once again the spotlight goes over the crowd, and lands on Bob. Bob stands up (completely buff now, a true badass). The clown repeats the lines of his joke, ending of course with "You sir, are a horse's Ass". Except this time...

The crowd is about to laugh except their laughter is stifled by the anger and hatred emanating from Bob. The tent is dead silent. Bob raises his right arm and points at The Clown. In an entirely calm cool state he looks The Clown directly in the eye, ready for this moment of self redemption he has worked so hard toward - prepared to unleash the ultimate insult upon this clown. He takes a small breath and says ....

Fuck you, Clown.

So, imagine all this being told to the crowd given the situation and anticipation that Elvis T has described.

At Terrastock 5, when Sonic Youth played, there were several catcalls re: the clown joke. Which Jim noticed. He tried to laugh them off. To cover up the fear.

That's a better joke than i expected it to be.

Youtube version, WOW: The Long Clown Joke

the archetypal shaggy dog story

cover of "outdoor miner" may be better than wire original. ain't easy to pull that off

-- kamerad, Friday, 6 June 2008 05:34 (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

Was just coming here to say this!

'strue.

One of those bands where the first thing you heard might always be your favorite. For me that is Distance. Great band all the way around though.

Anyone at that 1997 Terrastock? In its own small way, for a couple of different corners of the 90s indie landscape, that seems like an important event.

Surely not so small. Well, in my head. ;-) Elvis Telecom was there at least.

Holy heck, an actual interview!

http://thequietus.com/articles/18662-dave-pearce-flying-saucer-attack-interview

Cool!

Having a hard time getting into the new one despite my best efforts. It sounds cool and all, but I guess I'm waiting for it to reveal itself beyond that.

good interview

Hey, I like it -- expanded reissue of In Search of Spaces on vinyl...

https://www.vhfrecords.com/catalog/flying-saucer-attack-in-search-of-spaces-2xlp

But also streaming for free on Soundcloud

https://soundcloud.com/vhfrecords/sets/flying-saucer-attack-in-search-of-spaces-vhf145-2xlp

Also available on Bandcamp if you don't want the dead dinosaur version
https://flyingsaucerattack.bandcamp.com/album/in-search-of-spaces

Movietone 'Peel Sessions' (x3) release coming in the spring, according to their FB page.

Nice!