Greatest hits from my floor: Simply Saucer

So, if you read my year-end, you'll know that I'm trying (and mostly failing) to get a grip on the piles of CDs that are threatening to completely submerge my house. (Help, I'm drowning in indie!) I hauled another pile up from the floor and ripped them, pending quality, onto the iTunes a week or so ago, and gotta say, there's some good stuff getting stepped on down there.

I might get to some others later (Strand of Oaks, Hello Marseilles), but for now, let's have a look at this Half Human/Half Life CD, released by Sonic Unyon two or three years ago, and featuring the 1970s Canadian psychedelic-garage-blues-punk band known as Simply Saucer. The name, obviously, derives from Pink Floyd's Saucer Full of Secrets, and the sound, too, borrows heavily from Floyd's pedal-altered interstellar overdrives.

The band broke up almost as soon as it started...there were no proper studio albums at all, just a retrospective called Cyborgs Revisited in 1989, which was named one of the best Canadian albums ever by numerous sources, including Forced Exposure. Half Human/Half Saucer is the product of a 2008 reunion and, as the title suggests, half of it is live and archival, the other half post-reunion new material.

It's good trippy, sprawling, guitar psyche, a little blustery in parts, but well worth a listen. And, even better, I can now walk from the door to the light switch without breaking plastic.