Split

REPRESS AS STANDARD CD. Numbers and Erase Errata have already proven themselves essential to the new school of rock with their deft crossbreeding of the best elements of no-wave, punk, and disco to create brilliant ass-shaking hybrid songs. This release brings you these two purveyors of punk alchemy in their finest form.

The four women who comprise ERASE ERRATA started playing together in 1999, yet the uncanny way they respond to each other as musicians makes it sound as if they've been playing together forever. The songs are rhythmically layered concoctions of shimmying, sweaty, disco-beats, and clean bright bass lines which wrap their jerky, dance-y energy around distorted sawing guitar. Playing in perfect counterpoint to the music is singer Jenny's charismatic, declarative voice. Think Au Pairs, Fall, or The Slits on a date with The Contortions, and you're just starting to get it.

If this record were a race between two machines, ERASE ERRATA would be an artfully jury-rigged go-kart, and NUMBERS would be the robot craftily constructed out of left-over buzzers, re-wired circuits and obsolete industrial parts. Translated into music, this means danceable architecture of stuttering analog buzzes and beeps, crisply sparse drumming, and staccato blasts of guitar and keyboards. As Eric L sings, "my room is very small...inside it doesn't change," you feel his claustrophobia in the terse drums beats, short, sharp guitar attacks, and dry vocal delivery. The mechanics of these propulsive, beat collapsing, manic songs have surely hailed comparisons to Units, Melt-Banana, and Chrome before, but really, it's a sound all its own.