The grand gesture has always been a friend of Jeremy Enigk. His former band Sunny Day Real Estate squeezed every ounce of available drama into its songs and his vocals would push at the edge of their range as if hoping to find some other form of expression just on the other side. These days he seems more comfortable with restraint, and he sounds more in command when he hits the occasional John Anderson high note, but he still opens his second solo album (his first was almost 10 years ago, when SDRE were still a thing) with about as grand and dramatic a moment as he's ever committed to tape.
"A New Beginning" is just a minute-and-a-half intro track, but it's stuffed to the gills with strings, ringing bells, and cymbal crashes that make the title seem right. It certainly signals a break with his old band-- going back 14 years to the first SDRE album, it's an entirely different animal, a crashing, thudding rock album where this new one is basically sophisticated adult pop with some prog kicking around the edges.
That description is never truer than when he opens "City Tonight" by asking, "Am I late to the Kingdom of Love?" The song has a synth-pop undercurrent ballasting the verses, but it's all sweeping rock after the first few minutes, with Enigk multi-tracking himself and casting his voice into a well of reverb. Enigk's vocals get their biggest workout on "Damien Dreams", an interesting modal song full of hanging phrases that never feel resolved. He conjures up a hell of a growl in the middle of the song without sounding strained, but the track's most engaging moment comes when he provides a strange vocal harmony for himself on just one line-- an inventive technique to draw your attention to the lyric.
The orchestral grandeur of the album intro sloshes to the surface throughout the album, poking up most prominently in the drifting title track. "Dare a Smile" opens with an acoustic guitar playing a chord sequence you've heard in at least a couple of hundred songs, touched with a bit of mandolin, and as the string pads come in it starts to sound like some sort of alternate universe James Bond theme.
World Waits is a naturally big-sounding album from a guy who's spent a career trying different ways to make something this assured. It's an overwhelmingly agreeable record, if one that's not always gripping-- with few exceptions I feel like Enigk is performing with a net here, falling back on big production when the composition isn't all the way there. But this does mean he never really falls too flat, and the craft is certainly there in most of these songs. I get the sense from listening that it's exactly the record he wanted to make, and it's likely all of his old SDRE fans who graduated from their emo phases along with him will feel right at home.
