Remain

Album Review

It's fair to call Tyrone Wells' Remain his first real shot at the big leagues; it may not be his first album to appear on a major label, but it's the first to be crafted as such, and it shows. Remain is big intimate music: the songs are small-scale but the music is large, epic, and chilly in the best tradition of Coldplay and Jeff Buckley. This doesn't cause a disconnect on Remain, largely because the album works better as waves of sonic texture, something to wash over a listener. That's not quite Wells' intention, as his sincerity makes clear. Wells opens his heart so fully that he almost defies listeners not to delve deeply into his emotions, despite the album's rather incongruous cascading sound. Yet Wells' songs are elliptical, not melodic, and built on words, not hooks, so they lend themselves to this kind of cleanly majestic production, one that gives the music a sense of progression, perhaps even drama, that it otherwise lacks.