Erase Errata

At Crystal Palace

Troubleman Unlimited Records

By Timothy Gabriele

Collegian Staff

Last year while the rest of the world was prattling on about a No-Wave revolution in New York, San Francisco was actually having one.

All right, to be fair there were about four or five important bands making the experimental noise in the Golden Gate area. However, they were damn good at it and still continue to be.

At the center of this “movement” is the Erase Errata, a brutal foursome who received raves for their confrontational performances and twisted, tangled and tongue-tied debut album released on Troubleman Unlimited Records. It was Troubleman who gave them their start on the seminal double-album “Mix Tape” compilation, which featured just about every significant artist, mostly unsigned at that point, even remotely connected to this recently emerged style of music.

Since then, a frenzy of “next big things” has been hyped into nauseastic spurts of maniacal list building. Erase Errata briefed a few, but were overall lost in the scrap heap thanks to more fashionable mods of communication. Karen O’s willingness to become a sex symbol, or rather her drunken lack of concern about the media morphing her into one, warmed over the critics better than any uninhibited fury and finesse that some plain-looking, hard-working girls milling the stacks of Amoeba Records had to offer, proving once and for all that rock and roll is just another phrase for nothing left to sell and music criticism is never to be trusted (yes, even this one).

Though they are not likely to win any beauty pageants, Erase Errata do have an image that is not too far from the unstraightened skinny ties of the modern mod/nu new wave crowd. However, when they hit the stage like they just caught the school bus after partying all last night and stayed in bed well after their alarm clock went off, there is a sound to match that frenzied, hangover look.

“At Crystal Palace,” like “Other Animals” before it, jangles and screeches in dizzying, frayed patterns of Rowland Howard-esque guitar while the guttural bass plods methodically before exploding into the next mood swing. It’s raw, primal and indebted to that sense of urgency that evades most modern music. The songs themselves try desperately to keep their decadent sprawl under the three-minute mark, in the spirit of all great punk albums.

“At Crystal Palace” is also unmistakably fun for such dark and menacing territory. Their predecessors in assaultive acts, groups like DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, immersed themselves in industrial bile aimed at the pretentious coffeehouse-types that infiltrated New York’s punk clubs. Unlike those angry young men and women, and much like their contemporaries on the east coast, Erase Errata lift their disenchanted anthems above any brewing pot of negativity. This is thanks in no small part to the chilly contribution of singer Jenny Hoyston’s chanting vocals and the unstoppable booty-shaking beat machine of Bianca Sparta’s drums.

Earlier this year, the girls of Errata, along with fellow San Franciscan pocket-calculating minimalists Numbers, released a set of remix EPs under the guidance of Prankster Glitch Fiends on the local Tigerbeat6 roster. The remixers, artists generally known for their sporadically quirky untechno laptop work, reluctantly refused to remove the dance elements from the originals. Instead, Erase Errata opted to title their remix work “Dancing Machine,” an apt tag for what they have emphatically spun out with “At Crystal Palace.”

Album opener “Driving Test” whirls about in dizzying disarray, complete with its own stopping, going and parallel parking. “I find myself getting in the same accidents/ With the same cars/ In the same place on the freeway,” Hoyston hollers, as if caught in an irritating Groundhog Day-esque nightmare. On “Owls,” Sarah Jaffe’s guitar daftly squeaks in patches of mischievous, prickly taunting amidst synthesized hoots and four-on-the-floor pounding. These woods are the acid-tinged forests where trees come to life and the psyche manifests itself in the claustrophobic dungeonous paths that wind back on themselves.

“Let’s be Active c/o Club Hott” starts out by confirming that Erase Errata are capable of living up to the questionable Sleater-Kinney comparisons that have followed them, but soon dissolves into a frantic to-do list followed by ghostly off-tempo choral crooning. The song ends with more delectably detuned trudging guitars, recalling a more mellowed version of the gardens that grow in The Dead Kennedys’ “Ill in the Head.”

There’s a cartoonish lunacy in the erratic bounce of the Errata sound that may be their most distinguished fort