Glasgow-based Errors has never been a band to shy away from creating addicting electronic rhythms. Their previous two albums had the band mixing traditional guitars and drums with synthetic noise to create songs that you could both dance to and intellectually contemplate. The band's new song, "Pleasure Palaces," has the group turning toward the more complex pop sounds found in some of their best early tunes.
For "Pleasure Palaces," Errors brings out a new surprise from their bag of tricks: vocals. From the song's beginning, twinkling synthesizers and repeated melodies twist around the band's echoing chants. As the song progresses more and more melodies and assorted bleeps and bloops are added into the mix — culminating ultimately in the song sputtering to a stop and breaking down.
The video for "Pleasure Palaces," which we're happy to premiere here today, places the band members in a digital world full of nightmarish screen-saver imagery.
In an email, Errors member Simon Ward talks about bringing director Rachel Maclean in for the "Pleasure Palaces" video: "[Rachel] came up with the green-screened animation business deal scenario. Steev and I have been fans of her stuff for a while now. Her ideas are wild, funny and utterly surreal."
Maclean set her video in a world of lo-def textures and office clip-art, and applied an impressive use of a green screen to weave a tale of adventure and betrayal amidst a jungle of Safari icons. The only way the "Pleasure Palaces" video could contain more Macintosh computer imagery would be if there were winged toasters flying around.
Maclean told us how she and the band came up with the concept behind the video:
I found this stock image book a while ago with a load of 80s corporate graphics in it and got interested in the surreal and comic qualities of this kind of reproduced imagery: suited figures with globes for heads, businessmen climbing ladders made of money etc. This — teamed with the fact I had been spending far too much time using Mac computers — helped to form some of the basic ideas for the video. In my head it all seemed to fit well with the electronic sound and pace of the track.
Errors' new album Have Some Faith in Magic will be in US stores January 31st on Rock Action Records.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
