Earlimart
Mentor Tormentor
Majordomo Records
By Annie Lynn White
Mentor Tormentor opens with this beautiful song that builds slowly and naturally until you’re finally overwhelmed by the cacophony of what they’ve created and realize you’re listening to some powerful stuff. I tried listening for the lyrics once, and every time I realized I hadn’t been paying attention, even though I had tried so hard to listen. After I had repeated the same song for the fourth time, I decided that the music held more for me than any of the lyrics could.
And that’s what Mentor Tormentor is like. It’s not continuous from song to song, each one has its own identity, but the album plays like a symphony. You get lost. Your mind brings you back to reality just long enough to lose yourself again. You want to listen to it and hum the melody into a lover’s ear as you fall asleep. It’s like music you vaguely remember hearing in a dream when you were three. It reminds you of the past that you can never reclaim, or maybe weren’t even around for, while remaining absolutely contemporary.
Aaron Espinoza and Ariana Murray have created something wholly organic, love songs and love-lost songs vocalized earnestly by a man and a woman together at once, the way they ought to be. The piano is often restored to its rightful role as a percussive instrument. Every element of the album is calculated and deliberate, and the result is melancholy perfection to an unusual degree.
This is music that makes a good blanket as the glumness of winter sets in. It lets you wallow in the misery from a cozy vantage, at once objective and absorbed. It’s like being the fat chick who’s letting herself eat cupcakes all night because she’s upset about being fat and she knows it’s circuitous, but it makes her feel better even still. After listening to it all the way through as comfort music, one feels a lucidity and relief not unlike falling asleep after a good three hours of crying, or maybe even fighting.
But it’s in a good way. You know?
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