At some point in the ever-scrolling void of the modern music landscape, where every third indie EP is “a deeply personal meditation on liminality” recorded in a shed in Maine, you stop expecting sincerity to actually work. But then something like The Earth & All Within appears, and you remember that sincerity isn’t the problem. It’s the people who treat sincerity like a marketing strategy that are. This project meanwhile, seems like someone who accidentally made a debut album while attempting to orchestrate a nervous breakdown with a string section. This is not a complaint.
The Earth & All Within is part concept album, part therapy session, part late-night Tumblr post with a live band. It’s lush, theatrical, painfully heartfelt, and arranged like a musical adaptation of an emotionally repressed Victorian diary. Think Pretty. Odd.-era Panic! At The Disco, but someone swapped out the glitter and eyeliner for a library card and a really intense fondness for T.S. Eliot.
The album opens with “The Earth,” which is not so much a song as it is the musical equivalent of slowly pushing open the door to a very emotional greenhouse. It’s an overture in the classical sense; with delicate string swells, dramatic pauses, and the kind of orchestration that makes you sit up and go, “Wait, is this going to be one of those albums?” (Yes. It is.) It also foreshadows later musical themes, which makes it feel like Ellis has thought about this. Which he clearly has. Possibly too much. Again: not a complaint.
From there, Ellis dives headfirst into all the big emotions like a man who’s been told he has exactly 45 minutes to make peace with his entire adolescence. “We All Fall Down” should, by its title, be a maudlin dirge. Instead, it somehow turns collapse into catharsis. The strings don’t mourn. Rather, they lift. There’s a surprising amount of hope here, tucked inside a gutpunch of a song.
Then there’s “Can’t Wait 2CU (Again),” a song title that belongs on a lime green iPod Nano, and yet? It works. It’s earnest to the point of audacity, with piano flourishes that sparkle like a prom-posal in a coming-of-age movie no one actually had the budget to finish. It feels like if A Great Big World took a Xanax, read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and decided to feel something again.
Things take a slightly more toxic (but still classy) turn on “I Never Liked You (Anyway…),” which, yes, includes the all-important parentheses. This track sounds like the ghost of a pop-punk breakup song was reincarnated as a string quartet. It’s bitter, but like, catholic school bitter. It’s classy enough to bring a violin to the fight. Imagine Mayday Parade got invited to perform in a candlelit cathedral, and for some reason, they agreed.
But it’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that makes you stop and really reflect. Yes, it’s that Prufrock; the poem you probably skimmed in high school while trying to figure out what the word “etherised” means. Ellis doesn’t modernize it; he doesn’t flip it or turn it into slam poetry. He just sits with it. Sets it to music. Wraps it in acoustic warmth and sings it like it’s his own eulogy. And for a very specific, very strange moment, it feels like the entire weight of the 20th century is humming under his voice. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works.
The final track, “& All Within,” isn’t just a closer; it’s a reckoning. It brings back melodies and lyrical echoes from “The Earth,” folding the album in on itself like some kind of musical Mobius strip. It doesn’t resolve, not really. But it doesn’t have to. The point isn’t to end. The point is to feel the ending. The weight of it. The smallness and the grandeur. The sense that something just happened, even if you can’t quite name what.
If all this sounds over-the-top, good. That’s the point. The Earth & All Within isn’t interested in being subtle. This is an album for people who still cry at overtures and annotate poetry books. It’s for people who say “I’m fine” and then put on headphones to feel not fine in high definition. It’s musical maximalism in the service of emotional honesty, and it’s a big selling point.
In the end, this debut is less an album than a nervous system laid bare. It’s tangled and over-orchestrated and borderline theatrical, yes, but it’s also tender and intricate and full of genuine, wide-eyed effort. It dares to believe in the emotional weight of its own sincerity.
And when you reach the end, you don’t feel like you’ve just listened to something. You feel like you’ve been somewhere. Possibly the woods. Possibly your own feelings. Possibly both. Wherever it is, The Earth & All Within makes it feel worth the trip.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
