Erase Errata are a bunch of wolf-skinned Venuses

Fcuk, this is the bset abulm of the yaer! No, we hvae not got bekonrs but prehpas you read lsat week aubot rscheearch at smoe uinvterisy or oethr, wihch sohewd that it deosn’t ralely mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are palecd. Appenratly, the olny imrpoatnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteres are in the rhgit plcae, becuese eevn if the rset is a toatl mses, you can still raed it wouthit any graet porbelms. That is bcuseae we do not raed ervey word as a whole, and our bairn do not eevn see ‘of’. Point proven? Well, I was gonna write the whole critique this way but Ed Chief told me not to be “Knig Cnut!” (And it takes fcuknig ages to type!)

Anyhow, the point of this little demo is to demonstrate, in lingual two-dimensionality how Erase Errata sound like, on their second album ‘At The Crystal Palace’; all the elements are known, familiar but assembled, arranged and employed in a manner that recalls some bygone time without reverting to the old ploy of ‘homage’ (i.e. direct copy). Rocking in a New Wave style of 20-odd years ago that is also experimental, alternative, uplifting, dissonant, punky, waving from the margin of out-there…

Life’s a discrimination zone daily bombarded by… a carpet of futility that is kitschily ‘decorated’. We shouldn’t be looking for WMD in Iraq because they are everywhere, be it spiritual, intellectual, cultural: Hollywood blockbusters, mainstream trash (from Justin T. to Linkin Bizkit), from New York’s bonk-buster books to the West End’s musicals… Television, tabloids, radio… Help!!!

Whenever a dial is aimed at Radio 1 – the crappiest, saddest, dumbest sounds emerge! This side of taste, we prefer things that move you, disconcert, disturb the comfort of pitch blankness and then flood the senses… But, hey, there’s no ideal country, no coolest place, no perfect civilisation! We all live own trailer-park/yob tragicomedy. Oh, the melodrama of decay and the fall of values.

Erase Errata’s album ‘At The Crystal Palace’ is like liberation for the prisoners of the reality that, more and more, resembles a cross between ‘The Truman Show’ and the ‘Stepford Wives’. These five San Francisco women – they are so anti-bull there are no pix on the artwork or their website – make music that is so open, raw, basic and yet rich, with references…

Ready? Gang Of Four, PiL, Magazine, The Slits, Crass, The Residents, The Raincoats, Patti Smith and Au Pairs, The Velvet Underground with Nico and Tom Tom Club… It is no one in particular but the whole lot – thrown into a cauldron, mixed and simmered as a cathartic, healing and revingly-reviving potion! Man, is this a ‘Slider’ into a parallel universe surrounded by a bunch of Venuses in wolfskin, perhaps?

Thirteen gems here – dealing with issues such as ‘Driving Test’, ‘Go To Sleep’, ‘Let’s Be Active’, ‘Ease Me Over’ – fly by too fast as it is all over in 27:25 minutes! Thus, the debut album, ‘Other Animals’, was (re)released on the same day.

Riffs, melody, rhythms and vocals, unlike in Dido’s case, can be very arousing.

9/10