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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Earlimart

[#] Everyone Down Here (2003)

Reviewed April 28, 2018

Silver Lake heads seaward.

You know you're forward thinking when, smack dab in the age of P2P networks, your album comes pre-packaged with MP3s. Indeed, the enhanced CD portion of Earlimart's 2003 full-length Everyone Down Here features a 160kbps copy of the entire album, crossfades mixed out and all, ready to share with your Limewire buddies. Whether or not that was the intention is up for debate, but Everyone Down Here is definitely something worth sharing. Earlimart has always been Ground Zero for the Silver Lake music scene, thanks to the band's home base of The Ship studio, but this one makes a compelling case for why their music should be taken just as seriously.

On paper, there's not much original about Earlimart. Semi-acoustics, pianos, breathy vocals, spare balladry, and vocoder tantrums are all present, but it's the tight songwriting and use of textures that give Earlimart the edge. While pseudo-singles "We Drink on the Job" and "Burning the Cow" tone down the latter for the former, the more subtle tracks really show off the album's strange, handmade sonics. If "We're So Happy" is Central Valley drone, "Big Ol' Black" is a schizophrenic at Alcatraz with bugs under his skin, and not once does the eerie "Hospital" let on if it's medical or mental in nature. Certainly one would have to be a little sickly to give away MP3s of your album in 2003, but turns out, it's just crazy enough to work.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"The Movies", "Lost at Sea", "Hospital"	"We Drink on the Job"	"05" and "11", the album's nameless interludes

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