Track-By-Track: Errors' Have Some Faith In Magic

Tusk
I'd just bought a new harmony guitar pedal the same day I started writing this, which gives everything this sparkly quality. I've been getting into the twin-harmonic-guitar à la Steely Dan's Reelin' In the Years. It definitely has an 'album-opener' feel to it, we wanted something that would have an impact. It's the only song on the album not to feature vocals. I definitely think there's a prog influence here too – Scottish prog!

Magna Encarta
This is our first tune to make use of prominent vocals; a starting point for the direction that the new material was headed in, it was already in the bag and we released it as a single last March. The only difference with this version is the addition of live drums. It uses more or less just one synthesiser – the Poly 800, from the same month and year that I was born (September 1984). I can imagine a scif-fi film where we're accidentally swapped at birth but then meet up years later to duet on this record. It was finished within three days, which is why I think it sounds quite consistent even though it travels down many paths.

Blank Media
As I was travelling down to the old studio one day, I decided to get off the bus early and walk through the Barras; I was listening to The Cocteau Twins on my headphones and walked past a stall selling 'Blank Media'. I got into the studio and wrote the first section for what became this track – I had just bought a new reverb pedal and was looking to get that Cocteau Twins flangey-reverb sound which you can hear in the intro. This is probably my favourite of our new material because it seems unlike anything we've ever done before. We used Take My Breath Away by Berlin as a reference point for this song, hence shit-loads of reverb on the snare drum. 

Pleasure Palaces
This is actually the second version of Pleasure Palaces, the first of which I accidentally deleted just as I had finished it. I actually cried when that happened because I'd spent so long working on it and was really happy with it. I was taking pretty strong (prescribed) codeine at the time of recording this, which made me feel pretty spaced-out most of the time and probably influenced the ethereal quality that the tune has (but also led me to making idiotic mistakes like deleting the whole thing). Once I had wiped away the tears, sworn-at and booted a few inanimate objects, I began rebuilding the tune from scratch. Originally it was called Ben Vane after the hill of the same name – as I started the tune the day I climbed it. But I didn't really think that suited how the tune eventually sounded, so we named it Pleasure Palaces after a programme about historical British buildings of pleasure and leisure, by the engineering enthusiast and historian Fred Dibnah.

The Knock
Similarly, this tune was named after a hill I climbed, but this time it stuck. A lot of it was written when we were on tour in the US last year; it's pretty difficult and frustrating to write on the road, everything becomes disjointed and I think that can be heard a little here as it sounds like two tunes in one. It's got some auto-tuned vocals at the start and a Terrahawks sample which I slowed down and warped on my 4-track. It captures a moment when Zelda is berating her son for being an idiot, you can make out the words 'Sorry, mother,' which sounds pretty sinister. John Carpenter's soundtracks were an influence on this one, the chimey melody and the constant bass-line are tricks of his that we've borrowed.

Canon
This was written and recorded in one day in December 2010. The bass line is really confusing; just when you think you understand the pattern of it, it suddenly doesn't make sense any more. I recorded this in my bedroom, using an old knackered snare-drum as a 'bongo.' All the synths on it are a Korg DW-8000, which is from around the same time as the Poly 800, but it's got a more digital late-80s quality to it. There are wee synth noises on there that remind me of Roedelius, which I was probably listening to a lot of at the time.

Earthscore
The title of this comes from the 1976 film At The Earth's Core – a film about Victorian scientists journeying to the centre of the Earth where they discover a strange underground labyrinth ruled by telepathic birds and inhabited by cavemen and monsters. I had that on in the background as I started writing this tune. I think the title ended up influencing the overall sound, because it's pretty epic and tribal. The early demos are unrecognisable to what the tune eventually evolved into, having started it in November 2009, right after we finished recording Come Down With Me and taking until August 2011 to make it satisfactory. This is definitely the longest we've ever spent on a track; there were points when we almost abandoned the whole thing, right up to the end of the recording process we were still arguing about it, mainly about how the drums should sound. Again, this is more prog influenced, it travels down unexpected avenues before you realise you are back at the start again, similar to the labyrinthine world of the film that inspired it .

Cloud Chamber
This one was being completed right up to the final moments of the deadline for the record. I couldn't help thinking of Enya when recording the vocals and I think that's pretty evident in listening to it. We made most comprehensive use of the synths that we had recently purchased (Yamaha DX7 and Roland JX 3P) on this one; the working title was Nervous. It took on many forms, being deleted and undeleted several times.

Barton Spring
I was experimenting with one-take recording when writing this. At the end of the recording one of the synths makes a discordant 'wvwamp' sound – that's me accidentally leaning on the synth in an attempt to press STOP on the computer, I think little nuances like that can be good and make the music a little more interesting. The drums are from an old Casio keyboard, which I saw in the window of a charity shop and used the day I started recording it. I felt that something was missing so got in touch with a guy called Kip Uhlhorn who plays in a band from Memphis called Cloudland Canyon, asking if he could help me out with some vocals. I met him at South by Southwest earlier that year and we'd talked about collaborating at some point, so it was great to get him involved.

Holus Bolus
I had more or less finished this a year prior to writing the rest of the record, but I didn't have an ending. The vocals were probably influenced by the religious choir music I'd been listening to around the time. The working title was Shallow Tears, but we decided that sounded like a terrible emo band's name so we changed it to Holus Bolus, which means 'all at once' and suits its nature as there are so many instruments playing the same parts in unison. The noise-out at the end was fun to do.

Have Some Faith In Magic by Rock Action Records