Earlimart Album Recommendations

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

[#] Hymn and Her (2011)

Christmas cheer.

Reviewed January 6, 2024

Every successive record in the Earlimart canon takes them the river's ride further and further from the homegrown, textured indie pop that first came out on The Avenues EP in 2002, and 2008's Hymn and Her is no exception. With all the spring reverb across the vocals and guitars, there's a distinct chamber pop angle to this record, certainly wintry, almost Christmassy, especially when Earlimart are led around by their pianos, like on "Before It Gets Better" or the choruses of "God Loves You the Best". This gives Hymn and Her a pretty unique feel across their catalog: pared down to their two main members (hence the title), Earlimart gives us a snowed-in set of twelve tunes that are as pleasant, sugary, and sweetly sung as they are depressingly claustrophobic.

"And Heaven's not the same/In the rain/It's just a sad old day like today/Like today/But I'm already in your heart," Earlimart's leading man Aaron Espinoza whisper-sings on "For the Birds". It's rare that Hymn and Her is sonically as dysfunctional as its lyrics; it's always pleasant and often downright bouncy. There's definitely something troubled in the record's heart though; "Cigarettes and Kerosene" seems as fond of teenage delinquency as its name suggests, "Face Down in the Right Town" evokes a lifetime's worth of disappointment and lost loves, and the title track pleads for rest and safety in nowhere else but where no one can touch you, your dreams. Hymn and Her is the perfect record for those who like their instrumentation gentle and their lyrics near burnout.

Essential:	"Song For", "Before It Gets Better", "Hymn and Her"
Quintessential:	"Face Down in the Right Town"
Non-Essential:	"Tell Me"
Rating:

[#] Treble and Tremble (2004)

Turns out, the end was just the beginning for them.

Reviewed July 29, 2023

There's this moment in a band's discography, often very early on, where they go from hobbyists piecing together disjointed songs to writing capital-A Albums. That's when the strange-but-neat experiments peter out and the concepts start to creep in, and Treble and Tremble is that album for Earlimart. It'd be far too easy to define this album in the context of the death of a certain well-liked whispery singer-songwriter who sounded a bit like this, but that's just more mawkish music journo bullshit. What this really is the sound of is a guy who's starting to get confident in his songs, with the sonics from Everyone Down Here intact, but more singularly focused, crafted as opposed to assembled.

You're still getting everything Everyone Down Here was good at—the simple little indie pop piano ballads (see the intro "Hold On Slow Down"), driving clean guitar ("The Hidden Track"), barking through a fuzzbox ("Sounds", "Unintentional Tape Manipulations")—but it's all built with a specific mood in mind now, namely the feeling of pushing through loss with music. It's quality stuff, and "Heaven Adores You" (which gave its name to the Elliott Smith documentary) and "It's Okay to Think About Ending" (which was featured on House M.D.) proved there was some commercial viability there too. Earlimart's later album trajectory was set on this one, and given how well it works, who can blame them?

Essential:	"First Instant/Last Report", "All They Ever Do is Talk", "Heaven Adores You"
Quintessential:	"The Hidden Track"
Non-Essential:	"Broke the Furniture"
Rating:

[#] Everyone Down Here (2003)

Silver Lake heads seaward.

Reviewed April 28, 2018

You know you're forward thinking when, smack dab in the age of P2P networks, your album comes pre-packaged with MP3s. Indeed, the enhanced CD portion of Earlimart's 2003 full-length Everyone Down Here features a 160kbps copy of the entire album, crossfades mixed out and all, ready to share with your Limewire buddies. Whether or not that was the intention is up for debate, but Everyone Down Here is definitely something worth sharing. Earlimart has always been Ground Zero for the Silver Lake music scene, thanks to the band's home base of The Ship studio, but this one makes a compelling case for why their music should be taken just as seriously.

On paper, there's not much original about Earlimart. Semi-acoustics, pianos, breathy vocals, spare balladry, and vocoder tantrums are all present, but it's the tight songwriting and use of textures that give Earlimart the edge. While pseudo-singles "We Drink on the Job" and "Burning the Cow" tone down the latter for the former, the more subtle tracks really show off the album's strange, handmade sonics. If "We're So Happy" is Central Valley drone, "Big Ol' Black" is a schizophrenic at Alcatraz with bugs under his skin, and not once does the eerie "Hospital" let on if it's medical or mental in nature. Certainly one would have to be a little sickly to give away MP3s of your album in 2003, but turns out, it's just crazy enough to work.

Essential:	"The Movies", "Lost at Sea", "Hospital"
Quintessential:	"We Drink on the Job"
Non-Essential:	"05" and "11", the album's nameless interludes
Rating:

[#] 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.