Eraser Hideout 12″
My band played with ERASER when we toured through Philly last spring, and their motorik, electro-damaged meltdowns mentally transported me right back to the first few years of our current millennium—it’s 2001 or 2002, I’m on the second floor of an old, dilapidated former downtown department store where I’ve come to see NUMBERS or ERASE ERRATA, everyone is smoking indoors, and the wood floors are buckling under the weight of people dancing in the light of a few junk store lamps and a half-broken chandelier. It was one of the best sets that I saw all year, and their debut record Hideout fully lives up to that live promise. There’s some wild no wave scrape lurking just beneath the claustrophobic (and especially NUMBERS-esque) robo-punk buzz of “Trans Air Force 2,” while “Dinner Roll” takes the stark, stuttering beat of TUXEDOMOON’s “No Tears” and folds it up into a much more concise and compact form, punctuated with shrill blasts of synth and tangled guitar, and the rolling bass line and flat-affect vocal commands of “Simon Says” are cut through with insistent, needling six-string jabs like a less unruly (but no less thrilling) SCISSOR GIRLS. Some of the best out-sounds out there now.
