Erase Errata - At Crystal Palace (2003)
I don’t remember why I heard about this album in 2003, but I remember the epiphany presented to me in the form of abstract lyrics, warm and biting bass tone, intermittent horn, squiggly and stabby guitar and ripping dance drums. My brain and consciousness warped, I heard Beefheart, I heard Minutemen, dissonance captured and harnessed, I heard everything I was ever seeking. The bass and guitar in their own quadrants, wrestling with each other across the melodies and across those drums. There’s an alternate reality where this album grabbed and exploded the consciousness of America in 2003, taught us how to diminish our world into small, organized communities and dismantle the never-ending war machine we were staring down and still has us in our grip today. Things are pretty good over there; they are able to keep the apocalyptic vibes in their music and not in their everyday lives. Maybe this feels like hyperbole, but maybe you haven’t heard this album yet.
At Crystal Palace opens with instruments trying to find each other, like someone trying to stack some kind of ooze that keeps rolling over itself and seeping through fingers. The way it starts sprinting from there into a song feels like the ooze solidifies into a hand one finger at a time and successfully grabbing onto a moving train. From there the instruments interplay in such incredible ways throughout the songs, weaving between locking together and unraveling, punk intensity thriving in dissonant territory.
This is exactly what I want from punk: frenetic, aggressive, frantic, but coated in dissonance and adventurous combinations of instrument patterns, feeding off and balancing playing against vs playing toward each other. We can split hairs about sub-genre and influences and reference points, or we can just be punk and allow punk to be whatever we make it. Shed uniformity (abandon diplomacy), embrace these sounds rooted in abrasive patterns and build a new fabric of American folk music.
Improvisation seethes through the music and lyric creation of these songs and I appreciate it. I was still being awakened to the thrill of music possibilities in 2003 and this album, owned by me in both LP and CD (picture me tooling around the Concrete Peninsula ripping this masterpiece with the windows down), was and continues to be an integral part of my musical and life journey. I’ll be forever in debt.
