Errors: Incubate to Accumulate

Back in 2006, three thin, white and slightly geeky young Glaswegian gents released an EP on Rock Action, the label operated by post-rock overlords Mogwai. In the often dour Scottish musical climate you would have been pardoned for mistaking the EP’s title, How Clean Is Your Acid House?, as being an oh-so ironic, snarky swipe at a genre of music the band despised. But Errors are not Ballboy (Club Anthems 2001 – my sides are splitting) and Acid House lived up to its name quite admirably.

Aeons seemingly passed before they released their debut album, It’s Not Something, But It Is Like Whatever, and in the interim they recruited a fourth member, James Hamilton, to bring live drums into the mix. Eighteen months later and the well-travelled four-piece are poised to release album number two, Come Down With Me, which, like Acid House, plays on the title of another daytime television staple.

“You get four complete strangers and fill them with drugs,” begins Hamilton of a drunken idea for a reality TV show. “Have them go to a club, then get to the point where they’re all starting to come down, put them in a room together and film them being completely paranoid in each other’s presence as they start to hate each other.”

Not too dissimilar to the original source material, then. As for the relatively short time it has taken to complete their new television show pitch-cum-album, Hamilton is less sure of their prowess. “I don’t even know if it’s been that rapid a follow up, or if it just seems that way because it took us so long to get our first album out,” he suggests.

For their debut, the band recorded in Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio. This time, however, the quartet secured their own recording space, the equally ominous-sounding The Freezer. “Having our own studio this time meant we often ended up overcomplicating things,” says Hamilton. “(We were) spending far more time on each individual track, worrying over a single keyboard sound for three hours. There were points where we were sitting there not knowing what we were listening to anymore.” It took the influence of outside ears belonging to guitarist Simon Ward's brother to kick Come Down With Me into shape. “Steven came into the studio and was just like ‘OK, this is what’s wrong with this, this needs to go here and this here is for the chop’. That basically made the album,” admits Hamilton.

Come Down With Me proves itself to be no party-pooper though, and even The Freezer - which Hamilton assures lives up to its name - failed to dampen the boys' spirits. “At times when we’d been in there for ages it just got so cold and miserable that we did that thing where you search for the antithesis to your situation. We were definitely of the mind that 'we’ve got our own studio, we've travelled a lot, so let’s see what happens.' That became a positive influence...it could easily have been four guys in a freezing cold studio in the east end of Glasgow writing a miserable post-rock album.”

Entirely more ecletic than your average band, Errors have had a lot of tags thrown at them in their time but ‘miserable’ certainly isn't one of them; new songs such as the hyper-kinetic Supertribe or album highlight A Rumour In Africa will keep their buoyant stock afloat. But for an outfit that has notably moved outwith its original confines, how does Hamilton classify the band now? “We’re definitely a lot less ‘electronic’ than we used to be,” he admits. “But even as a word it’s got its limits. Those elements of a band tend to be described only as electro, or maybe synth, and usually any description with electro or synth is followed by pop or rock,” he boggles. There’s a slight pause; oh god, what have we asked? “I think the closest thing that’s been said about us is post-electro,” he finally reasons.

Whatever it is, for a band originally conceived solely as a recording project, Errors are proving to be an unmissable live draw these days. Dates with the likes of Underworld, Gary Numan, Explosions in the Sky, Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai and various other fellow Rock Action constituents have obviously helped the quartet hone their craft over the years. “We’ve got to the point where we feel like we’ve turned into a pretty good live band,” nods Hamilton. “I remember early reviews were like ‘Aye, nice music but really boring live’ - that sort of thing. Fair point I suppose. Admittedly these were reviews from before I joined!”

The man jests of course, but within it perhaps lays a nugget of truth. Errors are most definitely crafting a fuller, varied and more organic sound in 2010. The ‘post-electro’ element still rides satisfyingly high, but within their synthetic mesh beats a real heart. To err is human, after all.