This Monday morning is brought to you, every day of the week, by Los Angeles' Earlimart. The band has Fridays and Saturdays and they all go by the word of Monday, by the affirmation that this is a day that contains no known cheery qualities, or just random flashes that take us to the lukewarm. The coffee needs to come in gallons say those plugging away at those day jobs and the prickly, stabbing sensations are just the unwanted flirtations from an unchangeable situation. It's a mountain of a day that's enveloped by dastardly ugliness and sour-pussed attitudes. Associated with the first day of the work week is a real death by committee, where the recognitions of the end of enjoyment and the beginning of five days of drudgery coincide in troublesome reality.
What Earlimart adds to the mixture is a humongous amount of unstable, thinking tendencies - the droppings that seed the mind when tough nights and weekends can't be easily cleared out and rationalized. There's no moving it along, nothing to see here in the sober (this obviously doesn't mean they were not affected by alcohol) nights and consternations that Aaron Espinoza and Ariana Murray turn into these pop songs that are just as much nightingales as they are funereal sensations, with black clothing as far as the eye can see and eyes fixed in a downward trajectory. They straddle that fine line between being broken and being on the rebound.
Earlimart makes a point to provide enough clouds and enough spikes of sunlight to dagger through those puffs like tritons coming from the strong arm of the god of goddess of the hard-fought and won mulligan. There's always reason to believe that the bottom has been identified and met, looked square in the eyes and then left behind. Only, it rears around and finds new ways to extend a leg and trip or to bite one on the ass when the thicket has been seemingly chopped up like diced onions. He who shuffles his shoes when he walks isn't always necessarily downtrodden, or at least doesn't have to be and despite the tendency to play upon the themes of heartbreak and being knocked around and down and out, the hardships never get the most of Earlimart. They delight in the relative trickiness that belongs to all situations that aren't typically governed by reason and more by the stoking of fireplace that's built into people. It can be hotter or colder depending on how much firewood is around to toss onto the charred logs and how much attentiveness can be paid to keeping the pile orange. People have to sleep sometime and that sometime can happen when they're awake and out go the embers that are needed to keep the extremities from feeling like Van de Kamp's fish sticks.
Espinoza sings about already being in someone's heart on "For The Birds," and yet a conclusion can be drawn upon extended listening that this is as temporary as it can be for most of the characters in Earlimart songs. It can change so quickly and when it does, the drawbridge gets cranked back up, a closing mouth that will not grant entry from here on out. It's easy to take the sentiment of the song in a different way than is lyrically meant and that is to hear the words as being stuffed with desperate longing for some old flame, suggesting that, "I was there once. I refuse to believe that I'm not in that heart any longer." Murray sings, "Would it be fair to say that you're in love with love?/Is that enough?" and again there's the undercurrent of loneliness that just can't be dispelled. It's as much on you as the smell of dismembered grass following a trimming of the lawn. It's as if love can't solely sustain us and then what? Then what?