Earlimart Album Recommendations: "The Avenues E.P."

Album Recommendations: The Avenues E.P.

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Earlimart

[#] The Avenues E.P. (2003)

Pianos for the ADHD-afflicted.

Reviewed June 20, 2023

Before Everyone Down Here, Earlimart was a real band, not just the name of a project led by one man in his home studio. The Avenues E.P. was the first sign things were going to be different—in place of the ruffled guitars and sneered vocals, there were distorted pianos, acoustic guitars, birds chirping, blips, murk, all courtesy of Palm Pictures. It's effectively a 12-minute teaser for the full album, a five-track suite of exclusive material (amusingly, Everyone Down Here gets its name from a track on this EP), complete with an interlude! But there's the rub—Everyone Down Here was already short enough, at a half hour long. These (very pretty) songs last less than half that.

"Color Bars" and "Parking Lots" are both my favorites here, the former as tense as the story it tells of outcasts sticking close, and the latter as aimless as the titular parking lots used more for drinking than parking cars. Even the interlude this time is quite a fun listen, like a muffled marching band next door with little piano glissandos popping up through the walls. It all sounds really nice! But again—"Parking Lots" is literally a minute-and-a-half long. How I'm supposed to pick a "bad" song out of 12 minutes of material, all of which crossfades to play as one long song, I don't know. The Avenues would've absolutely made me want the full album had I been around when it came out—but protip, think of it more like one long song than a whole EP.