Not much to go on with this band Erasers from Metal Postcard records except that they're from Perth, Australia which is unwillingly becoming a theme of the site now. From all angles and labels I can't seem to escape talking about that part of the world and it's a complete coincidence. I'm seriously going to have to start picking out records by checking out where the band is from. I have to give local bands a freaking chance here guys. Sadly it seems this duo Rupert Thomas and vocalist Rebecca Orchard have called it quits since this was pressed but it's a great document of when everything lines up just for a minute and all the possibilites of where this could go are pressed in four tracks.
A-Side's "Two of a kind" starts out with a Dodos kind of clicky sticks and odd timing combined with something like OK Computer's odd repetitions and synths. There's even brief moments of Explosions in the Sky's delicate high register melodies over the precision that they build up layer by layer. A breathy female vocal floats in over this like Young Marble Giants, hardly registering any sort of emotion, just passing by. A cool background vocal plied with chorus and delay for that otherworldly feel. The rhythms work in mathy ways while she barely pieces syllables together, it's abstract and post punk while being as mechanical and precise as any instrumental Tortoise tracks. A combination meant to set the two sides of this against each other. "Safe / Sound" fires synth sine waves up that remain the ever present straight line of grinding drone while loops from a Line 6 are the weird cyclic foundation for more and more tiny bits of melody to start germinating. Kicked on and off they float in sporatic directions from the trunk of this tree. Not a lot of real 'singing' here, just creating that kind of unsettling lack of emotional delivery on the track. The repetition and this angelic vocal continue to grind against each other with that slow, deliberate pace of Young Marble Giants. Cool with an almost drug psych of the Velvets to this, that downer sound passed out on the couch, except for the intricate woven mat that her vocal sits on.
B-Sides "Window" has the delicate electric opening like something from Don Cab that would then explode into heavy chunks of low end bursts but here an odd timing rhythm trips this waltz beat into the harmonium that barely changes. Droning along in that psych or weirdo folk sound, like Pocahaunted, Rebecca Orchard's vocal really starts to act like another textural instrument, lurking back there in the mix adding to the jerky layers of the track without getting in the way or taking front and center. Plenty of percussion all getting it's two cents in. "Autumn Trees" has an echo of New Order in this simple melody but the polyrhythms remind me of tunng, the way it's almos ancient folk music sounding, very traditional bu tthe way it's put together is new and impossible. There's a lot of hypnotizing and psych happening in what at first sounds like a minimal post punk ripple.
Pick this up from Metal Postcard Records.
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