As Earlimart frontman Aaron Espinoza discovered a few years back, sometimes heroes can become mentors-- even friends. A chance encounter with Elliott Smith in Portland turned into a long-term relationship that would help steer Earlimart's development from a roughshod, brooding college rock group into an underground success. Smith and latter-day guides Grandaddy are obvious talking points for the Southern California group, and the former still looms over the band five years after his untimely passing. On Earlimart's sixth album, Hymn and Her, Espinoza and partner Ariana Murray seem determined to explore the possibilities of change and nudge away from the Smith-meets-Sonic Youth tropes that have defined their career.
The full-blown changes haven't quite come yet, but Espinoza has cast his melodic net into the vast but well-charted waters of psychedelic rock. At times, the earnest machinations of "God Loves You the Best" recall the orchestrated warbles of the Flaming Lips and aspire to OK Computer at its most maudlin. Engineer Andrew Lynch has the Dave Fridmann touch, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was his hand that added the incongruently smoky touches of mariachi horns and tremolo-affected "desert guitar" of "Cigarettes and Kerosene". Arrangements seem meticulously planned where once there was friction between the group's melodic sensibilities; a lightly lush piano-pop here matures into an agreeable lilt-- to good effect on "God Loves You the Best", "Teeth", and "For the Birds".
The duo began making these moves prior to last year's Mentor Tormentor in both a quest to duck its own stylistic baggage and a reaction to personnel changes that left the two of them on their own. You may have noticed the pun in the record's unfunny title, which predicts that Murray has raised her profile on this record by taking more active writing duties after penning "Happy Alone" on Mentor Tormentor. Fortunately, she complements Espinoza well, rescuing his vocal musings from the abyss of romantic equivocation and providing a rougher side to the band's harmonies, and on "Before It Gets Better", lead vocals. Murray seems the more world-weary vocalist than Espinoza, whose smooth croon hews closely to Ben Gibbard's blueprints for enunciation of purple prose.
And so the problem with Hymn and Her is-- after years of being called out for sounding too much like their peers-- it feels like they're plagiarizing themselves. Raather than fully implementing Earlimart Phase Two, as they have hinted, the duo is still dressing up the same minimally satisfying ditties in ruffly fuzz; its still scrupulously orchestrating the same kinds of songs that appear on simpler, better Earlimart records. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with the pair's current M.O., the tendency to calmly and competently copy the solid compositional mechanics of people who will always be much more famous than them. But for a record which so heavy-handedly claims to be a bona-fide collaboration between Espinoza and Murray-- and which associates Espinoza with religious song (dig Hymn and Her's quietly arrogant titles)-- it seems like the only constant here is maddening consistency.
