Style: progressive rock, post-hardcore, math rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Eidola, Hail The Sun, Protest The Hero, Thrice
Country: Oregon, United States
Release date: 17 January 2025
Sometimes an album’s cover artwork alone is enough to fascinate you before you’ve even heard a note. In this case, what more is there to say than: frog. With cape. The fashionable amphibian dazzled the Progressive Subway writers from the moment he first appeared in our bookmarked albums, and the album which he fronts turns out to be almost as enigmatic as the figure himself. The lyrics throughout Object Unto Earth’s The Grim Village lean towards the abstract in a Rishloo-esque way, steeped in metaphor and built from tantalizing phrases made up of perfectly ordinary words whose slippery deeper meaning slithers away before you can get a grasp. Meanwhile, repeated mentions of frogs, crows, rats, and other beasts maintain a more grounded view of a forest community of intelligent animals.
The Grim Village features a unique guitar tone that defies any single descriptor, straddling the line between crunchy and fuzzy, combining the best parts of hard-edged post-hardcore, hazy psychedelia, and smooth, technical math rock. Individual tracks lean more in one direction or another, such as “On A Pale Horse I Thrive” which sets an aggressive post-hardcore tone early on, “Dreadful Lord of Toads” which maximizes the psychedelic elements, or the heavy post-metal overcast of “Onward With Blinding Speed” that opens the second half. These varied guitar features pair with a sharp vocal delivery reminiscent in part of Eidola, with also an echo of The Dear Hunter’s theatricality, and together these disparate components plot a map of the composer’s eclectic whims and whimsies as he leads the audience on a merry adventure through the woods.
The downside of all these different genre elements is that The Grim Village lacks a clear focal point or emotional center. At times edgy and hostile (“I Said I Wouldn’t but I Did”), at others dreamy and melancholy (“Alas, I Hop Along”), all these moods seem at odds with the overall aesthetic of Redwall-esque anthropomorphic forest creatures. As a further side effect, when certain tracks (like “Dreadful Lord of Toads” or the first half of “Sludge Crumpet”) let up on the forceful forward momentum and bring down the tempo, they tend to get lost in the milieu, not bound to the rest of the album by any obvious concept or even really by musical style. These drifting castaway moments divide the listener’s attention, robbing the more put-together climactic moments of some of their impact as the audience tries to piece together how we got from there to here. On the other hand, the nonconformity leaves room for unique little interludes like “For a Frogful of Dollars,” whose lively Western-film-inspired theme leaves me disappointed on every listen that it wasn’t developed into a complete song; a little more zest before the closing track might have helped carry through the momentum being built in the second half of The Grim Village.
Object Unto Earth founder Jonathan Zajdman offered some background behind the album’s development on their Instagram profile, saying “it became a love letter to being alive and being yourself, and how anything else is untenable and a waste of time.” He elaborated in a later post that the energy and creativity that drove The Grim Village’s creation arose from a nearly fatal car accident which he escaped with minimal injuries, saying that the creative process offered him a valuable form of catharsis after such emotional trauma. If I may read between the lines a little, that seems to also include the kind of existential emotional turmoil that follows a near-death experience. Although the surface-level concept expressed in the music itself has little to do with that fateful crash, the sense of catharsis comes through with full clarity; the final few tracks pull these themes out into full view in their lyrics. “Death is the Test of It” ends with the existential line ‘I died and I might and that’s okay,’ and “Bombina, Bombina!!” continues with its pseudo-chorus ‘Oblivion / You came a little bit too close / Now you’re here I′ve been struck by a fear / That I can′t outrun, outgrow, or face alone.’
These songs show the kind of radical acceptance needed in order to move on from such harrowing events, keeping their serious subject camouflaged by an upbeat and uptempo tone and emphasizing life’s little joys as a means of fending off mortality’s sudden proximity.The Grim Village presents a peculiar collection of songs, some remarkable and some not so much, laying out their author’s inner thoughts with varying clarity and specificity and reflecting on the value of life’s experiences, even the most mundane ones. Like a woodland peddler, Object Unto Earth offer up an array of trinkets and baubles to catch the eyes of passing market-goers; some are little more than pretty polished river stones, but exotic treasures hide within, hinting at legends of their own. The eclectic styles and fantastical lyrics bring surprises at every turn, most of them exciting, but a few also a bit disappointing as the momentum spins out down a side trail. So come, join this caped croaker on an amble through the arbor, and maybe you can discover some existential dread along the way!
Recommended tracks: On A Pale Horse I Thrive; Onward With Blinding Speed; Death is the Test of It; Bombina, Bombina!!
You may also like: Vower, East of the Wall, Children of Nova, Anemera, Rosetta
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Instagram
Label: Seven Sided Sounds – Instagram
Object Unto Earth is:
– Jonathan Zajdman (vocals)
– Eric Bloombaum (drums)
– Lucille (guitars)
– Emily Kinsey (bass)
