Jeremy Enigk, the Cobain/Lennon-crooning tenor of the late and lamented Sunny Day Real Estate, has released his first solo record in ten years, titled World Waits. During the interim we’ve seen the demise of Sunny Day; we’ve seen The Fire Theft arise from the ashes, and we’ve seen and heard bands rip off Enigk in ways we couldn’t describe for a long, long time. But it’s here. The Enigk-hiatus is over.

World Waits is a beautiful, devastating record, one that surprises, challenges; it give us the best and most realized Enigk that we’ve ever seen. Enigk’s vocals are the centerpiece of World Waits. And don’t worry, he still sounds as angst-driven, as raspy, as somehow-British and effeminate as he does on Sunny Day’s The Rising Tide. But you can tell he’s dropped a lot of his Lennon influence. We don’t hear him screech “Waiting a year hereafter” and feel the Beatles, like how we did on ‘96’s Return of the Frog Queen. Enigk has really sunk into his voice. You just trust his voice. From the introductory howling over epic strings in the album’s opening track “A New Beginning,” to his pleading in “Dare a Smile,” you trust his power and yet he never threatens.
On the music side, expect suspended chord picking, layered guitars and vocal melodies, and acoustic-fueled chamber music explosions that feel sacrilegiously good, like the powerful “Been Here Before.” Expect a bit of creepiness, like the moody rock jam "City Nights." Expect beautiful and subdued ballades, a’ la Rufus Wainwright, like the loungy “River to Sea.” In general, World Waits is a fairly calm record. And then expect to be fooled into thinking it is a calm record, especially when you hear “Damien Dreams,” at first a slow and stomping minor chord lament, which builds to distorted wrath, and Enigk battle cries.
All of this is well and good, but the most odd thing about World Waits is the subject matter. It’s about real things. It’s about fear, love, about growing up and being unsure, about keeping hope. We can practically see Enigk wave goodbye to his Frog Queen years on the album’s last song “Burn,” as he drops this bomb on us: “every tear, every choice, every breath you have, let it go. Because misty skies won’t last, all that is left is what you show.” Return of the Frog Queen was a treasure because of those misty skies; because of the aesthetic novelty, the fantastical lyrics and song titles about magic and castles, and lines like “Wait a while in your castle there,/ Fly through window moonrise dream paradise.". But things have changed. World Waits offers a real conversation about the real world, but thankfully Enigk has always been the genius who could give us this but make it feel like fiction. World Waits is even more focused and considerate than Frog Queen, even if it’s a little bit older.

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