From pain to artistic gain

It’s been 11 months since Elliott Smith died from a knife wound in his Echo Park apartment, but he doesn’t seem to be going away. The singer-songwriter’s final album, “From a Basement on the Hill,” will be released Oct. 19, and before then comes a preamble of sorts. “Treble & Tremble,” the fourth album from the Los Angeles band Earlimart, is an emotion-drenched reaction to the death of Smith, who was a close friend of Earlimart’s leader, Aaron Espinoza.

This double helping of Smith-related music is one more example of the persistence of the singer’s legacy. His memory has been attended by an unusually intense mourning among his fans worldwide and especially in the tightly knit Silver Lake music community to which he gravitated when he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s. (Initially reported as a suicide, Smith’s case is now officially under investigation.)

Smith was different things to different people -- the genre-defining troubadour of the alt-rock generation; a tragic, troubled figure who couldn’t shake his demons -- but to Espinoza and other musicians in his circle, he was a supportive friend and musical inspiration.

“When I first met him it was magical,” says Espinoza. “He just had that thing you’re attracted to. Magnetic. There was sides of him that were very reclusive, but if he let you in, it was a pretty good feeling.”

In “Treble & Tremble,” which arrives in stores today on the Palm Pictures label, Espinoza grapples with loss in a richly orchestrated, grandly melodic, experimental-tinged pop setting. “Well I miss you my friend / Will I see you again?” he sings in the plaintive opening song, setting a tone of longing that over the course of the album will give way to imagined conversations and warm reminiscences.

“Treble’s” quest for solace amid pain evokes the Eels’ “Electro-Shock Blues,” one of the albums Espinoza listened to (along with ELO, Spiritualized and others) in preparation for his move into a more orchestral sound. But the album’s breathy vocals and minor chord progressions have already drawn comparisons to the sound of Smith’s records in some early reviews.

Espinoza says there was no conscious effort to evoke that model. In fact, he seems intent on defusing all this Smith talk.

“There’s a good portion of Elliott in there,” says the musician, sitting with longtime bandmate Ariana Murray in a diner up the street from the recording studio he co-owns in Eagle Rock. “But it’s not a tribute record. I think it’s just a record that maybe he would have liked.... It could be about anybody that you’ve lost or didn’t get to say certain things to. Regret and joy. It’s just a natural human thing.”

It’s understandable that Espinoza, 29, would like to refocus the discussion. Here he is, finally leading his band into daylight after years in the wilderness, and instead of his own career and artistic development, all people want to talk about is Elliott Smith.

“It’s hard for Aaron not to be influenced by Elliott,” says Brian Aubert of the Silversun Pickups, another of the bands in the Earlimart orbit. “They were so close. His ideas and his way kind of rubbed off on Aaron, just the way Elliott saw music.... But I think it’s more a catalyst to bring out all this deeper stuff in Aaron.”

That deeper stuff stayed buried for the first few years of Earlimart’s existence as the band lived the spartan indie-rock touring life to the hilt.

“We have a certain ebb and flow that’s very Earlimart,” says Murray, also 29. “Sometimes we have the one-step-forward-two-steps-back syndrome.”

Earlimart finally hit the wall after too much touring with too little support.

“The future seemed to be bleak,” says Espinoza, who grew up in Fresno. “The band sort of dissolved, and for some reason I felt like that was the time to make a record.... There were no rules anymore. There were no expectations, no label, no band. There was nothing to lose. We were basically at rock bottom.

“Once that had been realized, the songwriting started to change, being more adventurous with the themes and the instrumentation and the orchestration and everything. Then it became a whole new world.

“One of the scariest things you can do and one of the hardest things you can do is be honest with yourself. I feel like those first couple of records, I was just trying to write songs that would sound cool.... But there was definitely some masks put on out of insecurities and not having a lot of self-confidence.”

Things started picking up on the business side too. The band signed with the large independent label Palm Pictures, which released “Everyone Down Here” last year.

The album unveiled Earlimart’s new sound, which reflected the influence of two new collaborators, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Jim Fairchild, and set the stage for the more ambitious “Treble & Tremble.”

“I think it’s good to fall on your face,” says Espinoza. “We fell on our face a lot during the career of this band. We’re finally up to our knees now.”

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Earlimart

Where: El Cid, 4212 W. Sunset Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Thursday

Price: $5

Contact: (323) 668-0318