Earlimart head dreamer Aaron Espinoza is a product of California's Central Valley and you can hear it every step of the way in his band's ragged nouveau pop psychedelia. It's in the steady midtempo rhythms, which summon the pace of life out on the Big Dirt. It's in the sweetly melancholy chord progressions and warbling keys which play like refracted afternoon sunlight through the dust. It's in the drowsy, casually symphonic, distinctly quirky arrangements that make you think of surveying the rural landscape on a porch miles and miles from the L.A. sprawl after a couple of cheap beers and perhaps a bit of country homegrown. It's in the band's very name, which it shares with a little agricultural town on the 99 midway between Fresno and Bakersfield. And most of all, it's in Espinoza's breathy voice, which seeps into your consciousness like a brother you never had, regaling you with gentle, wry tales of out-of-the-way hope and hurt, isolation and frustration. It's as clear as day on the modest anthem "Burning the Cow" (a Valley euphemism for talking smack about where you're from) on which Espinoza sings, "It's where we're from and we'll always be, but we won't let 'em get to us, so come on, come on, we'll choke on the dirt, come on, come on, we'll choke on the dust, but we won't let 'em get to us, burning the cow..."