Earlimart

While the occasionally fuzzy guitars and heavy drumming on Earlimart’s sophomore release, Treble and Tremble, provide a few brief but tense, lo-fi spine shivers, they really just coat the album’s ghostly piano melodies with a thin veneer of frustrated anger. Aaron Espinoza and Co. aren’t fooling anyone. Despite the fitfully clenched fists, Espinoza’s inner child is more likely to cry and sputter under the sheets in his room than scream in the frozen foods aisle of the grocery store.

The simple, droning riff of “Sounds” borders on mildly disillusioned art punk, and “Unintentional Tape Manipulations” is the shard-scattering explosion of a superiority complex long sealed up inside a glass bottle of love and pity, but the airy descent from “Sounds” into the muffled party conversation ambience of “The Valley People” gives away the album’s secret: Earlimart don’t despise anyone, even themselves; they’re just bored, video-game generation kids with nothing to do but wish there was something to do.

Even the self-effacing confession of “Broke the Furniture” peers reluctantly like hazy sunshine from partly cloudy southern California country skies. “A Bell and a Whistle” doesn’t rain; Espinoza would just rather spend Sunday inside, “writing letters full of love” like the gushing “Heaven Adores You” and “Hold On Slow Down,” “put your records on…and always sing along.”

The album’s closer, “It’s Okay to Think About Ending,” assures us of exactly that, but friends like Elliott Smith, to whom the album is dedicated, must have missed the fine print: that thinking and doing are different animals, and the space between temptation and sin is a long, lonely drop. Treble and Tremble ultimately finds moping more cathartic than violence, and in the end is content to ride this life out. Even with its prevailing images of isolation and seclusion, Treble and Tremble ultimately settles on the grudgingly sunny pop of “First Instant Last Report” and “The Hidden Track” despite its best efforts at rainy days.

---