Though Chris DeMay’s candid narratives reveal a desolate heart, he’s quick to note that he’s ready to “start a brand new song.” The six tracks on Bigger Than Small illustrate a relationship’s painful disintegration, and akin to other material in the canon of break-up albums, it’s heavy.

The opener, “Trying,” is a raw, acoustic track that reflects on both sides of a relationship gone bitter. Over Rhodes piano lines, DeMay sings in a Costello-esque voice, “I’m ok if you want to deviate from the path you’re on.” The song displays a desire for closure, and it’s an appropriate way to commence an album that’s laden with heartfelt, confessional-based songs.

The country-tinged ballad “Drag” is DeMay at his finest. Alongside a mourning steel guitar he sighs, “All of my flowers won’t bring you back.” The anthemic chorus exposes a sad sentiment, but it still manages to resonate positive magnetism in its melody. The slow, waltz-like tempo compliments his lyrical analysis of a wavering commitment that now simply “feels like a drag.”

“Red Letter Day” finds DeMay stuck in solitude on “the loneliest day of the year,” Valentine’s Day. He’s aware of the dramatic, self-deprecating nature of the lyrics, but he makes it work. His hopes come clear in the line, “We’d make love once for sure, and maybe even twice,” but he comes to the rather amusing actuality that, “The only hand touching me is sadly mine.”

DeMay’s cover of Bob Dylan’s Big Lewbowski-approved, “The Man in Me” is brilliant. The mood matches Demay’s lyrical tendencies, and it fits nicely alongside the rest of the songs. He sings, “Take a woman like your kind/To find the man in me,” which is later mirrored with his own line, “The best of you comes through me.” His double-tracked lead vocals create some alluring harmonies and powerful moments, especially with the line, “I think to myself I might not take it any more.”

The closing track, “Bigger Than Small,” is intimate like the opener, but the difference is clear. Throughout the album DeMay has become battered like a prizefighter that’s out of punches, and as the album cover denotes, he has hung up his gloves. The songwriter has finally attained the closure that he sought in “Trying,” and it helps make the short collection feel coherent.

In the closing moments of the record DeMay sighs one last time and professes, “Now I see/Now I see.” It took him a while to arrive at this realization, but it was the punches along that way that produced some truly poignant music. Figuratively, DeMay may not have won, but this EP is surely triumphant.