Laptop twee, or indietronica revival, or whatever we’re calling the insane ways Gen Z is torturing singer-songwriter music inside Ableton nowadays, is, by nature, an intersection: a place where everything from skramz to cloud rap to glitch pop collide. This wide range of influences allows artists to apply the ethos to a wide range of styles. They can go full micro-sample bricolage, as early progenitors ear did on their latest Rumspringa; they can push further afield into lo-fi outsider folk, like London duo Bassvictim on ?. Or they can embrace the mess and blow it up into Age of Adz electro-acoustic grandiosity. Along this third axis lies New Jersey band $quib’s debut record Erring: a self-professed compilation of half-baked ideas that accidentally coalesced into epic songs of the self.
$quib is ostensibly a duo composed of New Jersey native Brock Bierly and Krotida Satyr, but the second name actually belongs to a fictional cyclops, so take that with a grain of salt. The decision to cleave responsibility for these tracks away from a single person is perhaps a reference to the difficulty of translating thought into action; it’s as if there’s some tiny gremlin inside us who intervenes and scrambles the signal along the way. This struggle is on display on the album’s second track, “Schrodinger,” which would be a straightforward twangy guitar thumper if it weren’t for the intermittent cut-outs that introduce giant chasms of static and warbly chipmunk vocals. Each gap feels like Bierly tossing a draft in the wastebasket to try again, obsessing to the point of making nearly unnoticeable changes, like when he swaps “Archimedes” on the first verse for “our committees” on the second.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The point, though, as “Schrodinger” insists, is to just “shit out things” and see what comes; sense-making happens afterward. “Geoguesser” begins as an understated organ piece in which Bierly recounts mistakes: losing a phone, making a wrong turn, leaving clothes on an Amtrak. These seemingly innocuous incidents attain new significance as they’re revisited alongside a slow crescendo that suddenly turns to shuddering piano chords on the track’s bridge. The existential search for purpose takes center stage on “Ephus roundshot & floater,” which employs the impossible-to-hit pitch in its title as a metaphor for our inability to grasp the trajectory of our lives. “Instead of the field ahead/Three strikes and you’re out of it,” Bierly sings, though there’s still the crack of bat against ball in the background, suggesting we make it to where we’re supposed to all the same.
Bierly’s delicate voice proves surprisingly adaptable throughout the record. On “crusher,” he uses it to quell a Body Meat-style drum barrage into something like a lullaby about getting out from under your own thumb, and on “ER,” he rides a jerky hip-hop beat that sounds like something off Injury Reserve’s post-apocalyptic By the Time I Get to Phoenix. But while he’s capable of wresting pathos from chaos, he’s at his best when catching hold of silver linings through melancholy. “Not th thinker 2” sounds like a mindfulness exercise gone wrong, set to a drum loop that can’t find its own rhythm, but you still get the sense that Bierly will manage to stumble his way out of it all the same. The epic 10-minute closer “Warning (If I had a hammer) 2,” a Dijon-ified cover of Sam Cooke’s interpolation of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” offers the most hopeful message of the album: that despite all the muck and mire in our past, we can still look ahead and build something better. There are always new mistakes to be made.
