Say what you will about Jeremy Enigk, but bear in mind that if you fail to rank him among the most gifted singer/songwriter/musicians working today then I wouldn't trust you to wipe your ass without a spotter. As the prime mover of Sunny Day Real Estate he is often credited with the creation of emo, and their eponymous sophomore release has been hailed as the O.K. computer of the now ubiquitous genre. Depending upon how you look at it, infighting either prevented them from cashing in on their invention or being forever pigeon-holed by it.

Enigk found God around this time and the Born Again would-be king released the underappreciated solo effort Return of the Frog King and followed it up a year later with the re-banded SDRE and released the beloved How It Feels To Be Something On, which in my opinion was the high-water mark for Sunny Day, though I'm not one of the prog-challenged harpies who turned their nose up at the more rich and atmospheric grand opus The Rising Tide. With it's sonic tip of the hat to Yes and Led Zeppelin, Rising Tide presaged the direction in which Enigk intended to go and only a chronic jack off doesn't consider the resultant The Fire Theft to be his crowning achievement to date.

As for his latest solo release World Waits, it's almost as though Enigk paid to much attention to the critics who felt that Fire Theft was pretentious and over-bloated and all the other pomp and circumstance such numbnutted twerps are so quick to fire in the direction of anything that is too complex for their out-sourced brains to grapple with. Of course only Jeremy knows for sure if the lush, but certainly simplified World Waits was any kind of response to this or simply the next logical step in his development.

It certainly offers Enigk the opportunity to showcase his chief gift, that seemingly limitless and arresting voice that can bridge a whisper and a wail as effortlessly as Jon Anderson, with whom he can most accurately be compared – particularly when he adds those angular harmonies. Yet unlike Anderson his voice is more versatile, less quirky and hence less limiting especially in lower registers. World Waits is definitely a mood record, that requires little maintenance (you can put it on at bedtime and drift away with it, without having to worry about drastic changes in volume or tone.) Overall, I consider it to be a notch too homogenous and unchallenging, but it's still the perfect bedroom soundtrack or rainy day curl up and read a novel music. Albums like that, by geniuses don't come down the pike very often.