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Also this issue: Vinyl Smarts Between Language Arts Summer Monster Tight and Wild Mickey Hart and Bemb Orisha Cornelius |
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August 8-14, 2002
music
 ERASE HER HEAD: Youâll get a better look at Erase Errata when they open for Sonic Youth this Saturday. |
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Rock Luddites Erase Errata find comfort in the chaos.
Listen to Others Animals, Erase Errata’s Troubleman debut, like a record. Put it on second side first; for the turntable-impaired, start with “French Canadia,” a face-off between synth-pop burble and cock-rock vamp that abruptly turns into an art-damaged rant. Then try “Fault List,” a murmured pep talk on catching up with your life when you’ve fallen hopelessly behind. This is a less intimidating way to ease into the album than starting from the start. By sneaking in the back door, you can avoid getting mutilated by the tsunami of “new wave meets no wave,” a description rock snobs have used to appropriately, but reductively, peg the San Francisco Bay Area quartet.
You can forgive the snobs, though. It's hard to get past "Tongue Tied," the spiky opener, which sounds best on repeat. And once you tire of that, there's "Billy Mummy" to get stuck on. Then "Delivery." And "Marathon." It's easy to see how some people might never even get to Side Two. It's still a shame, especially since the whole thing's over so fast -- Erase Errata's songs average just under two minutes.
"As soon as the song's long enough that it's not laughably short, then we know it's done," guitarist Sara Jaffe says as she and her bandmates pass around a cell phone in Flagstaff, Ariz. And though she's joking, it's clearly not far from the truth.
Bassist Ellie Erickson has her own take. It's ready "after we practice it enough and stop messing up every time we play it. Soon as we all feel comfortable with our parts." But considering the band's off-kilter charm, you've got to hope completing a song is more dependent on comfort than perfection. With Jaffe constantly fighting to stay in tune and singer Jenny Hoysten purposely off key, a bit of messing up suits them just fine. Then again, comfort can be overrated. Some of Other Animals' best songs sound like speed ballet on a tightrope. Jaffe's guitar never slacks, but it's the only thing keeping everyone else from crashing down.
Like the bands they're most often compared to, chaos is part of Erase Errata's appeal. Delta 5, Liliput and the Raincoats sounded deliriously shattered; it was like they impulsively followed professional climbers up a mountain and broke their bones because they didn't know any better. Erase Errata pushes the injury, furthering fractures even though they do know better.
Erase Errata may not sound much like their hardcore Bay Area neighbors (Numbers, Total Shutdown, Burmese), but they share an aesthetic that gives equal weight to politics and dancing. Hoysten makes a conscious effort to write words that sound good together while keeping their meaning just below the surface. "A lot of the words that Jenny wrote for that record had a lot to do with what was going on in the Bay Area in terms of the dot-com explosion and gentrification and all that," Jaffe says. It's a sentiment easily understood by anyone who's seen movie palaces closed and all-ages venues shut down.
Hoysten says "How to Tell Yourself from a Television," whose brainy boogie rises above poorly recorded vocals, "had a political motivation about it, where I was writing about displacement in my neighborhood, and about how I thought that money had become the main driving force in San Francisco's government, as opposed to, like, community and the people."
That's one reason for the anti-technology thread that runs through Other Animals. A skeptic might say Erase Errata couldn't have made the album without technology. But a cursory listen shows how awkward they feel using it. That hesitation extends to their instruments. Although they've all played in other bands (Hoysten and drummer Bianca Sparta currently do double duty in their queercore duo, California Lightening) they talk about their equipment with a sense of distance. Hoysten once forgot to pack her trumpet after a show, while Jaffe borrowed a guitar after the airline misplaced hers on the way to record Other Animals -- and then got another loaner after the guitars were stolen right before their last tour. They're good-natured about such occupational hazards -- a far cry from the all-points bulletin Sonic Youth put out when their gear was abducted a few years back.
Barring such last-minute emergencies, Sonic Youth and Erase Errata will play their own instruments at the Troc this weekend, and four sweet young ladies would appreciate it if you'd dance for them.
Erase Errata plays Sat., Aug 10, 7 p.m., $20, with Sonic Youth and Bardo Pond, The Trocadero, 10th and Arch sts., 215-922-LIVE, www.thetroc.com.
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