Jeremy Enigk - World Waits

If, after listening to a album, you cannot remember any of the songs, the album is a bad one. Jeremy Enigk’s World Waits is an easy listen, with pleasant arrangements and some decent singing, but it is about the most unmemorable thing I have heard in 2006. All I have taken away from a dozen listens is the notion that there are better ways of paying homage to The Beatles than emulating ELO. In fact, the only things that stick in my mind are the passages that have been lifted from other bands, most of them purveyors of late '70s arena rock. Enigk is like The Flaming Lips without the fun. He is so self-serious and introverted that it is near impossible to pry oneself into his tin-can head. His vagueness has an appeal, but the emptiness of his world is ultimately a bore. When you have a great band, as Enigk did in the '90s as the frontman of Sunny Day Real Estate, the sonic appeal can offset the shortcomings of the songcraft. Alone, albeit with an arsenel of hired hands, he performs with the low-energy intensity of a poser who is frightened the world will find out he has nothing to say. [www.myspace.com]