Earlimart

Mentor Tormentor

(Shout! Factory)

Record Review by Sarah Jane

Earlimart, you’ve done it again. Musically near their Pixie-aping 2003 album Everyone Down Here - with their feet in the air and their heads on the ground - Mentor Tormentor’s “Fakey Fake” After The Gold Rush acoustic rock layers build to a wall of studio sounds, with unsettling lyricism underfoot. The tinny intro of “Answers & Questions” turns inside out in an exuberant whirl of AM radio friendly guitars and keys that could make The Big Chill blush. “Nevermind The Phonecalls” – too trusting jangle pop that it is - naively fell prey to that Get Up kids cliché of writing songs about being lonely on tour. “Everybody Knows Everybody” picks up where their tweak cover of Springsteen’s “State Trooper” left off. “700>100” achieves peaceful Nevermind–era Nirvana.

The Phil Spector-produced John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band influenced Mentor Tormentor also. A friends of friends collaboration, Plastic Ono Band is a good metaphor for The Ship collective, and Earlimart – now credited as Aaron Espinoza (an everyman Halfxican from Fresno) and Ariana Murray. Murray’s unYoko-like (thank you Jesus) lead vox and writing debut, “Happy Alone” is “Eleanor Rigby” sung in the first person - its Figure 8 instrumentation a reference unto a reference (“Baby Britain” listening to Revolver.) Mentor Tormentor’s cinemático string compositions reach phosphorus Pikul dreaminess - making “The Little Things” the prettiest song ever written about white flight. “Don’t Think About Me” is beautiful – and as a second hand account - intimately embarrassing like watching that scene in Pretty In Pink where Duckie sings Lennon’s “Love” in Andie’s room while she listens through the vent. The Neil Finn-style melody and Da Doo Ron Ron’s of “Gonna Break Into Your Heart” are awesome. Finger snapping and animated birds whistling “Nothing Is True” have sunny days sweeping the clouds away.

Sadder than Jayden James on parents day, “Bloody Nose” will break your heart with its evocative piano and cascading nu-Spector (ouchie) ah ah ahs. The allegorical harmonizing of “The World” makes the fatalistic scripture bearable. “Can’t Help Falling In Love” with 50’s ballad “Just Because”. In “Cold Cold Heaven,” a veritable Creedence Clearwater Revival, Espinoza testifies with The Ship congregation like a man working the steps, and processing the twelfth (Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.) And it was good.