Jeremy Enigk is the lead singer and one of the guitarists in the seminal Emo/Post-Hardcore band, Sunny Day Real Estate, and is cited as one of the biggest influences for the genre of Emo. Their first album, Diary, was critically acclaimed and they recorded their follow up album not long after. Sadly there were tensions between the members and they disbanded before the album was released, but luckily their label, Sub Pop, released their second album untitled, but is commonly known as either LP2, or as a self-titled release. After their breakup, Enigk decided to record his first solo album and this is what came out.
This album bares little resemblance to Sunny Day Real estate’s first two albums, so if you’re looking for a continuation of Diary and LP2, then look the other way. This has a much more mellow sound than the SDRE albums, and incorporates either an acoustic guitar, or an electric on a clean setting backed up by orchestral instrumentation with a more or less style of chamber music creating the baroque pop sound that encompasses this album.
The sound of Return of the Frog Queen has a much more personal and intimate feeling than the Sunny Day Real Estate’s more angst ridden work, and this is really evident in songs like “Lewis Hollow” and “Call Me Stream”. Despite the album having an overall mellow sound, Enigk doesn’t fall trap like many artists where all of the songs kind of have the feeling of everything sounding the same. Many of the songs in Return of the Frog Queen features a diversity of sounds ranging the mellow solo acoustic and vocal performance of “Lewis Hollow” to the buildup and climax of emotion with “Shade and the Black Hat” which starts off with intense piano driven riff and the orchestra slowly builds up the entire song by adding more instrumentation as the song continues.
Probably the only complaint of this album is the short running time of 29:27 and you sometimes get the feeling of wanting more with its short tracklist and some of the songs being relatively short, but it seems that it works to the album’s advantage by getting to the point instead of beating around the bush like many similar relatively slow paced albums seem to do. Enigk has decided that it was much better to sacrifice length for quality.
Grungie’s Rating: 5/5
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