Customer Reviews

Mirror

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This isn't for the faint of heart. If you like those simple 1-2-3 alterna-bands, don't look here. Beautiful, noisy, shimmering layers of guitar (and two beautiful not-so-noisy short tracks) that can make my night anytime. This is even better than FSA's last one. Viva la wall of sound!

Not so much a whole album as it is two EPs. The first half is acoustic/psychedelic, while the other half is more dancey/shoegaze type stuff. (with the two middle tracks tying the two halves together.) Maybe not their best work, but it's worth the price for Wintersong alone...

I thought I'd add my two cents in light of some of the less than stellar reviews this album receives below. This was the first FSA album I bought, sound unheard, and my initial reaction--before reading the credits--was that it had the same uniquely disturbing "feel" as Pearls Before Swine's "Balaklava." I'd only heard that combination of fragile beauty and everpresent dread once before, and it made an indelible impression. Then I read that "Space 1999" was dedicated to Tom Rapp. If you ever liked Pearls Before Swine, FSA's music should strike a responsive chord, although I'm not exactly sure why. It was my first listen to "Islands" that made me a lifetime FSA fanatic. As a reviewer below put it, those distant, yet brutal, brutal beats that sound like some malevolent machine, the incessant strummed chord that sounds like an alternative edit from "Formentara Lady/A Sailors Tale," (King Crimson-Islands) and then when the feedback drone begins, eventually enveloping the entire song in a wall of menacing noise all one can do is sit there speechless. Everytime I listen to the album, I wince when "Islands" starts. I've got just about everything recorded by anybody in the shoegaze and noise genres,and while FSA are not a band for everyone, if you can find the beauty in punishing beats, overdriven guitars combined with whispered vocals and the most incredibly delicate acoutic guitar figurations imaginable, you should give this a listen. Space 1999, Islands, Chemicals and Wintersong are the standouts, but Mirrors is best appreciated in its entirety as an album. I hate to quote everyone else in this thread, but when I'm trying to describe this music to others, I always fall back on the editor's review above "like being caught outside the gloomy factory under a slate grey sky." Although it sounds not at all similar, this music goes to the same place as Sibelius's 4th Symphony and Shostakovich's harrowing one movement String Quartet #12. There's something about FSA's music that comes frighteningly close to perfection, and while some of there earlier works might realize this approach more consistently, I can't imagine being without this album. Tense, beautiful, delicate, screaming, driving, sinister, thundering blissed-out noise. If my house caught on fire, I'd go back in to rescue the FSA albums.

Follow-up to the UK's duo 'New Lands' CD(see my review).Believe this was FSA's last studio album.First thing one would notice about 'Mirror' is that it's more acoustic than past efforts.Tracks that were the most impressive include the opener "Space(1999)",the eight-minute "Islands"(disc's lengthiest cut),"Winter Song" and "Chemicals".Maybe not the best work by guitarists/vocalists Dave Pearce and Rachel Brook,but still a decent swansong and worth a listen.So-so space pop by a artist that used to be considered more like drone/noise space rock.

I purchased a bunch of FSA CDs expecting spacey, washed out ambient type music. Their recorded output seems very hit and miss, and Mirror is absolutely a miss. The "singer" mumbles over every track, sounding like he's barely humming, barely in tune, and it is supremely annoying. Lord only knows why the band had to ruin interesting instrumental tracks by putting the same boring "vocals" over every track - its totally uninteresting, repetitive and unmusical.

Avoid at all costs, unless you like your ambient music played with some boring dude mumbling over it. Awful stuff.

I am not sure if FSA has good albums, I am certainly sure they have amazing sons. Mirror has it all, some excelent noisy atmospheric sons and some dull acoustic ones. Although they (or he) seemed to be somehow bored in this album, maybe that's why is their last.

Strange music to say the least. Strange not as in wiered, I mean strange as in tons of time and work where put into the washy background guitar-scape with gentle flow, and then dave sings over top of it completley destroying the mood. Dave can't hold a harmony if his life depends on it. He's always of time, and his acoustic pluckings sound worse than a three year olds efforts. How did HE get a record deal when me or anybody else could do much better?