It's a bummer to walk down St. Mark's in New York City and see all the 12-year-old punk kids dolled up in the shredded threads, patches ablaze, cocking total disdain for every sight and smell. It makes me feel old. Long copping out to the grim reality of commuting, college loans, bullshit office banter, and having to leave before the bar gets gonzo to go home, that manic-tipped sense of urgency is sorta gone for me. Also, a decade of Tortoise-ing has left indie rock and assorted sub-genres decadent, non-verbal and completely without social comment.
Perhaps that's why there's been this dubious post-punk/no-wave revival. People were all over the Bush/Reagan similes a year ago, and at least musically, it's all come true-- corporate metal, synthy pop and the angry, newly articulate underground have boomed. Witness Erase Errata, four ladies who rock harder and smarter, and with better beats than most stunningly hung left ones. Combining the jumble of DNA, the snarl vox of the Scissor Girls, and the leaping bass of the Birthday Party, they have just the right ratio of catchiness to antagonism, and they work it as a ploy for repeat listens.
Other Animal is their first full-length and it almost topples itself with cranky excitement at the venture. No moment goes without movement-- there's a sense of nervous anticipation in each drum's snap. Jenny Hoysten's carefully controlled sing-speak vocals have that blessed Kim Gordon tunelessness that sometimes stress into vibrato-heavy upturn. Her articulated sentiments drink from the close-bottomed well of angry girl-punk topics: fucked politics, capitalism, and adult-hating, with an occasional curious rhetoric about other species' superiority. (C'mon, ladies, really. Is the Rhesus gonna fix that warble in your bass cabinet? Monitor international food supplies? Hook up your cable?) Still, they seem smart enough to shade the evils of the western world in its sexiest time signatures, altered chord structures, and borderline linear structures. To borrow some St. Mark's mentality, "That's using the man to fuck himself." Well said, Sid.
Unlike Le Tigre, with whom they've held the stage and will be invariably contrasted with in the limited lady-pool of pop culture's mind, Erase Errata seems like a band that plays music first. Both will shake booties, convince other girls to plug in, and make it on the cover of Venus and other grrl-friendly mags. But Errata's got a momentum based not on star power, preprogramming, slideshows or calisthenics. Like the Gang of Four, Josef K or any band of borderline fame during post-punk's brief flicker, Errata pulls energy from the ever-bountiful over soul of dissatisfaction we've hid in our minds for the day to day. Channeled to a challenging rock context, it's simultaneously dead serious and hideously absurd.
And that's why it works. Tracks like "High Society" expose the recording's tin-covered gaudiness-- all distortion and mid-range-- which somehow robs the delirious sex beat of its urge. That the song grows from a Confusion is Sex-style noise jam only adds to the jumble as Errata spend equal time rocking their cocks as trying to cut others' off. But man haters they aren't-- just smart chicks pomo-ing about with their patchwork.
Being that they do rock, and that they do espouse the lines, I fear them somehow getting a Hanna-head that they're some kind of role model. One can only hope this god-forsaken caterwaul they've produced stays true to its lean turn, finding musical progress in changing times and not in changing fads.
