When news broke in December that San Francisco no-wave post-punk trio Erase Errata would be releasing a new full-length record come January, a certain corner of the music blog ecosystem began internet-hyperventilating. The descriptors "legendary" and "feminist" appeared more than a few times in writers' breathless attempts to bring youngsters up to speed on the band's importance — a necessity when writing about a band that's been off the pop-culture radar as long as Erase Errata has.
Though the band never technically went on hiatus, nine years have passed since its last-full length (2006's underrated Nightlife), since which its only musical output was a 7-inch ("Damaged" b/w "Ouijaboardin'") in 2010. To describe Lost Weekend (which the band self-released Jan. 20) as "highly anticipated" would be an understatement.
In drummer Bianca Sparta's cozy kitchen in the Mission District, though, things are a little more mellow. It's about a week before the record drops, and Sparta and her husband, bassist Dustin Clark (The Insides, California), are cooking dinner, while their wide-eyed 6-month-old son observes from a high chair, interrupting his mother every now and then with sing-song not-quite-words.
Though he can't really talk, he helps answer the question: "So, what have you been up to this whole time?"
"Let's see," Sparta says with a laugh, when asked for a highlight reel of what each member has been up to since we heard them last. "Jenny [Hoyston] moved to Texas. Ellie [Erickson] is almost done with a grad program at Berkeley. And I had a kid."
That's a hefty oversimplification on her part: As a drummer, Sparta has backed at least a half-dozen other bands in San Francisco; since the beginning of last year, she's been the percussive backbone for Cold Beat, singer Hannah Lew's solo detour from Grass Widow. Up until recently, Sparta could also be found DJing at El Rio, or at her 9-to-5, doing installation work at the Oakland Museum of California. In other words, her recent maternity leave notwithstanding, she's been a busy woman — if not prolific in the traditional musical sense.
"[Erase Errata has] never broken up as a band. We've just taken long breaks because we're always doing other things," says Sparta. "I am curious to see how people react to this record because I feel like we're just not on people's radar anymore. But we're still here! And given the opportunity to do something together, we totally will. That's what this record came out of."
The opportunity in question was the Mission Creek Festival — oddly enough, the one in Iowa, not S.F. or Oakland. In 2012, the band was invited to be part of the festival's artist-in-residence program, for which it was paid in recording time at producer-engineer Luke Tweedy's Flat Black Studios. There, the musicians quickly slipped into their usual roles, improvising and bouncing off one another with a time-nurtured familiarity: Hoyston's angular poetry and penchant for freestyling were, as always, at the helm on vocals and guitar, while Erickson and Sparta built a rhythmic foundation around her, a grounding force (yet not afraid to get weird — never afraid to get weird) that's only grown more versatile as the band becomes more seasoned.
The result is Lost Weekend — named for both their weekend in Iowa City and the video store on Valencia, where Sparta used to work and the band used to play. After a hell of a lot of material wound up on the cutting-room floor, they found themselves with a surprisingly cohesive nugget of an album, made up of seven tracks that run from spaced-out surf-rock to handclap-heavy dance-punk to fuzzed-out, guitar-driven psych jams.
One thing veteran Erase Errata fans will likely jump on, for better or worse: The band's hallmark brevity — a tendency to write songs that clock in at about 60 seconds — is less rigid. Two of the seven tracks go beyond the four-minute mark. And where traditional song structure once seemed to be not so much cast aside as deliberately ignored, Lost Weekend sees the band finding a groove, maybe dancing away from it for a moment, but actually returning to it before a song's end. There are certainly still comparisons to be made with the arty dance-pop-punk bands that helped elevate Erase Errata's profile in the early aughts, but without the tinny, electro-sharp edges. There's a warm, human sensibility that travels from track to track.
"That just naturally happened," says Sparta of the new songs' staying power. "The whole band is a different animal now than it used to be. There's still a lot of that old sound in these new songs, but there are definitely more grooves happening, with the guitars especially, that gave us the choice of making them longer songs. It's less chunky from part to part; it's more like we wrote one part that we liked and then just jammed on it. Which is new for the band for sure."
Did that come out of new influences? Asked what she listens to these days, Sparta thinks for a moment, pausing to let the cat, Roxie, in through the back door.
"Honestly, I mostly listen to NPR and KALX all day," she says. "We all come from different places musically anyway, so what we create together is just sort of happenstance. We definitely don't sit down together, like, 'I wanna write a rap song.' It's whatever happens, happens, and if all three of us are in a room together to begin with, it's a miracle. And our time is limited, too, so if we have four hours to go practice and write and we get one thing out of it, then that's great."
Obviously, they got seven things out of that one weekend in Iowa City in 2012 — but it took another two and a half years to get the record to the people. This is the first album the band has self-released since its debut 7-inch in 2000 (Kill Rock Stars signed the band for a few years in the mid-aughts) and the process was both challenging and plenty rewarding. Writing songs together while living in three different cities seems hard enough; then there's the scraping money together for art, production costs, and promotion.
Then, too, there's the fact that the band members aren't in their early 20s anymore. Self-releasing a record this time around (on the band's own label, Under the Sun), the stakes just seem higher, says Sparta.
"I think we're more self-conscious because we have money invested in it. But also we didn't have the time constraints we might have had [with a label], which is great because we don't wanna put out something we don't like. [On] other projects we've had to do things in a rushed manner, and you listen back and go — well, there are always things you could have tweaked here and there. And of course it's just a little more dear when it's yours."
In short, it's an album that sounds a lot like a band that's gone and grown up, with all the responsibility and sense of autonomy that brings. On songs like "Don't Sit/Lie" — the album's final track and no doubt one of the danciest songs ever written about homelessness — you can't help but sense that some of the band's changes reflect San Francisco's own growing pains over the near-decade in which Erase Errata fans were waiting for "the next one." In which context, it's funny (sort of) to read interviews with the band from their first national tour in 2001: In more than a handful, band members find themselves explaining that San Francisco's soul is dying due to rent hikes and other gentrification-fallout from the first tech bubble.
Sparta half-laughs upon hearing this. "Oh yeah, it's the same thing. But I think it's here to stay this time. The city has just changed, and I don't know that it'll ever go back to anything normal — this is just what San Francisco is now." She's lived in the city since 1996, "except for the three years that everybody lived in Oakland, when we were like 'Fuck the city, we're gonna go live in a shitty warehouse in Oakland and wait for this to all blow over.'"
The ways San Francisco's changes have affected her life as an artist are tangible. "They raised the rent on our practice space. Finding places to play shows that aren't just totally cheesy — there really aren't anymore DIY spaces; you have to go to Oakland for that now," she laments. "And then all the bands you play with are going through the same thing: fighting the douchebag element that's in the city.
"Have you noticed how many juice bars there are? Like how much fucking juice are you selling to be in that weird condo spot?" she says. "San Francisco's a big city, with big-city problems. You can't just, like, Twitter-money everything away."
It's changed the scene as well, she says.
"I feel like people are becoming way less punk. Like even the scene is more conservative — it's all very Urban Outfitters, kinda flashy ... when I'm out walking the baby I don't see anything that relates to my music community at all. Which is not bad or good. It's just, you know, different."
So does she think she'll stay? She's the first to acknowledge that "nobody has kids here."
"Oh, yeah, we love it here," she says cheerfully, not missing a beat as she swoops her son, who has just begun a more concerted kind of shout-babbling, out of his chair. "We're very lucky to have rent control." She's got shows to plan, and a record to sell, before she figures out how to fix the city or the punk scene.
And more immediately, the kitchen timer has just gone off, meaning the rice is done. Dinner's up. Like building a groove, then stretching it, letting it breathe: one damn thing at a time.
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