I’m here to tell you about Further, by Flying Saucer Attack. Because it needed to be discussed.

I purchased this from the used bin at the record shop last month, and the owner told me it’d been something like a decade since he’d sold a Flying Saucer Attack album. My first thought: people are terrible. My second thought: I’m going to try rectifying this. So here goes.

I got into this band years ago while neck deep in a shoegaze journey, after exhausting the usual suspects. I’d devoured Slowdive, Swervedriver, Ride, Jesus and Mary Chain, and of course My Bloody Valentine’s era-defining Loveless. I scoured the feedback plains in search of the next step. I needed something more. Something deeper, further out there. I wanted to experience my mind turning to vapor, soaring out the atmosphere, leaving my corporeal form. I wanted music to take me where others used drugs or religion to go. Naturally, I stepped through the looking glass of the Spacemen 3 universe, never to return.

What makes shoegaze so attractive in the first place is the gauzy womb-like comfort of being enveloped in unending guitar tones, washed over and blasted away by tidal waves of feedback. Abrasive or smooth, it becomes a brain massage at proper volume level. It’s an instant journey outside the body, a steamroller for uneasy thoughts, a gateway to that liberating nothingness sought in meditation. When an artist truly nails it, nothing is more transcendent. When you’ve lived inside this sound long enough, it takes a new approach to reach the same heights.

Enter Flying Saucer Attack’s “rural psychedelia” and behold. Created by then-couple David Pearce and Rachel Brook, the expansive nature of this recording belies its bedroom equipment genesis, long before the laptop era. Fahey-like acoustic guitar and hushed blurry vocals ride inside an at-times deafening column of feedback. There’s a tactile beauty in these delicate textures, a sense that the low-slung noise is brushing your cheek.  Hot lips caress, whispering the songs deep into your ears. A lot of shoegaze barrels at you, filling the room and crushing your chest. This is more like the sky being colored in, drawing tighter, embracing warm and soft, and lifting you up.

Here’s a first dose, a perfect entry point.

Here’s a real trip. Hold on through the journey.

Well after that, not much can be said. I hope those of you open and eager for this experience have found it.

Further can be purchased from label Drag City, and thankfully Amazon has a few copies as well.