Sometimes shallow enough to judge a book by its cover, we liked this CD before it had even left its wrapper. We’d previously been seduced by distorted, buoyant, Sparklehorse-esque first single ‘Burning The Cow’, but at a time when copy controlled CDs are spreading like silicon wild-fire through a misinformed industry in a state of paranoid panic, infringing your right to self-govern your own listening habits (i.e. halting something as innocent as the copy of CD to minidisc), it’s a reassuring joy to see a band actively endorsing those rights by ready-encoding the whole album in MP3 on the CD. That they bundle in 3 videos, rather than the token one for ease of marketing, is the smiley emoticon on the e-cake. What’s that? And there’s a free fold-out poster included? For the old school presumably. We’re sold.
But all this moral and technical triumphing is but a bonus on what is one of the most unexpectedly out-of-the-blue successes of the year thus far. Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle assumes a co-production and performance position on the album, returning the favour for Earlimart’s Aaron Espinoza (who’s worked on Grandaddy, Breeders, Elliot Smith and Folk Implosion at his The Ship studios), but what could have ended as a mere smudge on Lytle’s CV in the scheme of things actually turns out as a bit of an embarrassment. An embarrassment in that despite his own band’s influence highly informing this record, their own latest (‘Sumday’) pales in comparison to it. In vitality, in tune, in sustenance, in height and remaining impact.
Grandaddy are the prime reference point for this band’s sound, from Aaron’s in-the-foreground-but-barely-there wisp-of-smoke vocal, to the strumming fragility of tracks such as ‘The Movies’, to the whimsy of songs like ‘We’re So Happy (We Left The Piano In The Truck)’. But plagiarism by its very definition lacks strength and the most basic of ideas, which Earlimart deal in spades. Even on its most sun-kissed and lethargic moments (admittedly another plagiaristic quality) it has an valiant urgency which the bearded ones have started to lose through their complacency. They muster a similar hazed pounding to the Dandy Warhols’ most fraught drug rock and there’s some Mercury Revving too, but while they may have found the party a couple of years late, they’re still probably getting looks of jealousy (rather than contempt) from the patrons for turning up wearing the same jacket.