SAVAK Reveal “Human Error / Human Delight” Album

How do we hold onto hope when we live in a time of unending crisis? Does love have any value if the planet is dying? Is there any justification for producing an album during a global pandemic? On their fifth full-length, Human Error / Human Delight, Brooklyn-based rockers Savak grapple with questions no less fundamental than these. They may not find concrete answers, but the exploration itself proves remarkably fertile. The duality inherent in the very title of the album indicates the group’s fascination with the dichotomous nature of merely existing. The friction between the twin titular concepts power the twelve churning, driving tracks that the record comprises.

Ultimately, however, underneath the hemming and hawing, there is indeed cause for hope. Savak wrote and recorded Human Error / Human Delight entirely over Zoom, suggesting that the transcendence of physical borders they open the album yearning for might not be such a far-fetched notion after all. But at what cost? As more of our lives are subsumed by the virtual and algorithms threaten to sort us all into our own solipsistic rabbit holes, the ideological borders that divide us are harder to traverse than ever. What to make, then, of music shouted into this tumultuous cultural cacophony? Does it stand a chance of solving any of the problems they so astutely name? 

Perhaps choosing a path of artistic creation when there are so many more pressing matters is both the greatest human error and human delight of them all. In this way, Savak have crafted a scathingly honest treatise on living in our present moment. This album is by turns self-incriminating and celebratory, both a distraction and a balm. One can only hope that as these competing ideas ricochet off of one another, they resonate in something like harmony. Human Error / Human Delight is now available via Ernest Jenning Record Co & the band’s own imprint, Peculiar Works.