FURTHER

It took me a couple of goes to get into FSA. Dave Pearce does rather like to scare you off - anybody who heard his cover of Wire's Outdoor Miner, most recently anthologised on that Domino Records sampler, will have found themselves wondering exactly whose bright idea it was to filter out the entire low end, leaving some guitar noise, hi-hats and not much more than the breath on Dave's vocals.

The formula for Further is quite simple - pastoral melancholy on acoustic guitar meets great sweeping washes of guitar feedback. A veritable orgy of psychedelic loveliness ensues. There are variations - opener Rainstorm Blues just has the feedback, plus a bit of unidentified rustling; various sections of the longer tracks strip back much of the noise. The genius is in the details. At times the washes are gentle and harmonic, euphoric in that way that Sigur Ros have made famous with their cavernous reverbs and e-bows. On Here Am I, however, it gets noisier and noisier, and is ultimately distinctly unnerving and physically uncomfortable at the moment it cuts off suddenly.

There's not much more to describe, really. It's worth noting that, in spite of no particular change in Pearce's working methods (ie, everything is still done in his house near Bristol on a cheap four-track), this is a fantastic sounding record. Unlike that Wire cover, there is bass. When everything's going full blast, there's no frequency range left unexplored. There's a real total feel to it - if you were going to have a religious experience, there would be far worse platters to stick on while doing so.

Absolutely magnificent.