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Flying Saucer Attack, "Instrumentals 2015"
After roughly a fifteen year hiatus, cult shoegaze/basement psychedelia visionary David Pearce has resurrected the Flying Saucer Attacker moniker, albeit in somewhat diluted form. Instrumentals 2015 is certainly sketchlike and devoid of vocals, but it still boasts Pearce's wonderfully smeared, fractured, floating, and tape-hiss-enhanced aesthetic, which is exactly what I was hoping for.  While some actual songs or a fully formed new album would certainly have been even better, late-period FSA was already quite abstract.  Also, I never looked to Pearce for great vocal melodies, tight songcraft, or killer hooks.  His talents lie elsewhere.  Everything that matter is here: this may not a complete return to form, but it nevertheless feels like the welcome return of an old friend who has not changed at all.
This is a both an enigmatic and weirdly mesmerizing album for a whole host of reasons, compiling 15 untitled and undated pieces into an unexpectedly satisfying and well-sequenced whole.  Nearly all of the pieces seem like one-take guitar improvisations, which makes Instrumentals seem like it could have easily been composed and recorded in just a day or two, especially since several pieces clock in at a minute or less.  Given their variety, however, that seems highly unlikely–this feels more like an enticingly incomplete record of Pearce’s intermittent experiments and evolutions over the course of his long silence, ranging from eerie, otherworldly glow ("Instrumental 1") to howling, gnarled guitar squall ("Instrumental 6") to a blurred and druggy twist on Sir Richard Bishop-style Eastern modality ("Instrumental 3").  Then there is "Instrumental 4," which sounds like a glassy and hazily warped church organ.  Most of the longer pieces, however, stick much closer to the expected FSA aesthetic.  Despite that, everything feels like it belongs here and it all flows beautifully.  I suspect that Pearce just culled some highlights from a vast backlog of tape, then painstakingly worked his hissing and hazy production magic to weave a kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory abstract narrative.  It is amusing to hypothesize that this album took 15 years to compose though, with David churning out just one song per year, some amounting to little more than 40 seconds of flute-like hum.
Given Pearce's masterful production and sequencing, Instrumentals works best as a whole, drifting along seamlessly as a single extended, dreamy, crackling, and druggy reverie.  That said, however, there are a number of substantial individual pieces strewn throughout the album that stand out amidst the ocean of echoey washes and warm swells.  "Instrumental 7," for example, is a beautifully fragile, quivering, and trebly shimmer of watery sustained piano tones.  Another highlight is "Instrumental 9," which builds to a lovely crescendo of reverberating backwards chord swells.  "Instrumental 10" and "Instrumental 14," on the other hand, nicely incorporate field recordings to evoke nocturnal fields of crickets and burbling waterfalls.  The album's lengthy final piece, however, does not deviate from the rest of the album or dispense with quirks so much as distill all Instrumental's best bits into one heavenly and elegantly warped guitar improvisation, as multiple tracks bleed and smear together into twinkling, narcotized bliss for nearly ten minutes.
While I suppose it is possible to be disappointed in what Instrumentals is not (a legitimate new FSA album), it is nearly impossible to find any flaws with what it is: a perfectly crafted, hypnotic, and distinctive collection of unheard work by an artist who has been quiet for far too long.  I DO kind of miss the vocals as an added layer though–regardless of their melodic merits, Pearce often had a wonderful way of separating them into a weirdly detached and floating layer that greatly heightened FSA’s unreality.  Allowing for its intentionally modest ambitions and limited palette, however, it is hard to imagine any way in which Instrumentals 2015 could be any better than it is.  This may be a minor album, but it is also an extremely good one.
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