Enya album 2021
It’s been 5 years since Enya’s last album which means a new one should be coming.There I was, minding my own business, catching up on Season 4 of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Enya is always more powerful when drawing from her Celtic and Catholic roots. But there are still some beautiful choral works like “Pax Deorum” and “Athair Are Neamh.” With Latin and Gaelic lyrics, Enya creates an ornate and slightly mysterious vessel into which we pour our own emotions and images. Pop ditties like “Anywhere is” with its nursery rhyme schemes, is so sweet it makes me want to brush my teeth after listening. This album really started the Enya slide into crushing sentimentality. Even though this was the beginning of the triumvirate of Enya, producer Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan, they still sounded like they lived in the world and not the stone bubble of their castle. It’s simpler than her succeeding albums, but more direct.
The soundtrack for a BBC television series, Enya mixes her choral chants with sweet ballads and a few instrumentals. This is her first album, originally released as Enya in 1986 and reissued later as The Celts. It has all the Enya signposts in a song that could be of lost love, or could be a hymn to the universe.It was Echoes December CD of the Month in 2015. “Dark Sky Island” is the epicenter of the album. But Enya’s spirituality is less religious and more cosmic, and the title track speaks to that. The “Alleluia” chorus on “Echoes in Rain” and a chant song called “Sancta Maria” draws upon catholic iconography The slow air of “So I Could Find My Way” sounds like a plea to God. Just her voice, layered into choirs, suggests sanctity. Whether singing in English, Gaelic or Loxian, Enya doesn’t need words to express the infinite. Only Enya can turn a hum into a celestial chant. “The Humming” is the opening of her new album, Dark Sky Island, and it’s meant to evoke the spin of the universe. The mood itself is darker, the voice more intimate. “Caribbean Blue” was the pop hit, but….Įnya’s 8 th proper album, Dark Sky Island, was something of a return to form and a shedding of some treacle. The follow-Up to Watermark, Enya’s third album continued and expanded on those themes with the gothic chants of “Afer Ventus” and “Angeles”, more tribal stomps with “Ebudae” and the heartbreaking “Evacuee” one of the few Enya songs with real world concerns, in this case the London Blitz of WWII. It has the hit, “Orinoco Flow,” the best of her “pop” songs, but it also contains the Latin-sung tribal thunder of “Cursum Perficio,” the cinematic expanse of “Storms in Africa” and “The Longships”, and beautiful aires like “Evening Falls.” Every Enya album after this followed the same formula. her second recording, Watermark, is packed with more gorgeous songs and original ideas than all her other CDs combined. If you have only one Enya album, this should be it.
Which might make you think I don’t love Enya, but I do because when she hits it, as she did most recently on the Dark Sky Island, she creates a sound, a mood and a spirit unlike any other.Įnya has only released 8 proper albums in 34 years, so it’s not too difficult picking out the 5 best. And her pop hits, which she hasn’t had in the US since 2000, became increasingly Disneyesque, beginning with the best one, “Orinoco Flow,” and then declining through thru “Caribbean Blue,” “Anywhere Is” and the puerile confection of “Only If….” Her voice, that beautiful instrument that shares a genetic lineage with her sister, Moya Brennan, is lost in turgid overdubs and indiscriminate oceans of reverb. Then there are times, more with each album, until Dark Sky Island, where she can be trite, even clunky with dated sounds and over-produced, clotty arrangements. Her music is meticulously crafted, her voice a heaven-sent instrument. There are times when she goes to a higher plane, an ecstatic, floating cloud of sound that exists between worlds ancient, future and imagined. I have a certain ambivalence toward Enya. Enya floats in waves of reverberation and synthesizer pads, her multi-tracked voice cascading around her like silken eddies. And when directors can’t get Enya, they just imitate her, like the score to Titanic. Whether heard in American Express ads or the movie, “The Age of Innocence,” her ethereal choirs and Celtic cadences seem suited to almost any mood.
The voice of Enya has become ubiquitous on television commercials and film soundtracks. Enya-The 10th Icon of Echoes: 5 Best Albums