TreeCat's Review of Amarantine

There are flaws. There are edges. There are places where the production should have been reconsidered and refined. There are hints through the album of the rumored troubles in the studio that kept Amarantine from its expected release in November 2004.

But, lay those aside and Amarantine is a heartbreakingly beautiful album, Enya's most personal to date. It's an album that explores love in all its variants and shades -- from hello to goodbye, to the quiet moments that mark the long-term partnership with someone you love.

It's an album that had me shedding a tear or two the first time I listened to it and heard the cuts If I Could be Where You Are, Long Long Journey and A Moment Lost, and then had me openly shedding tears the second time I went through it. Just as Enya has stripped away 70 percent of the vocal overlays that have defined her sound for the last 20 years, she has also stripped away the glass barrier between her music and her audience.

Isn't that a funny thing to say? Enya is known for her emotional music, music that reaches out to grip your soul. Only when I listened to Amarantine did I realize that for all the emotion expressed on her previous recordings, Enya has never put her heart on display as she has on Amarantine. There are tracks on Amarantine where it hurts. The achingly beautiful A Moment Lost dovetails into the following instrumental track Drifting to create a brilliant pairing of songs. A Moment Lost is about the hurt of saying the words you should not say. Drifting is the beautiful finality that comes afterward, when you know the words can't be taken back.

I didn't realize it yesterday morning, as I made my way to Target to pick up Amarantine but I was preparing myself for the album. I had on my mp3 player the two songs that Enya recorded in 1985 for The Frog Prince, a sweet teenage coming-of-age and finding love in Paris movie. Dreams and The Frog Prince were playing and I kept replaying them. Enya's voice is young, unformed and sweet and lovely to listen to in these songs.

So the innocent first love of The Frog Prince has grown up. Amarantine is a album of love songs for adults. There is joy, pain, contentment, worry and, in the pop-songish Someone Said Goodbye, a too-casual-to-hide-the-hurt "fuck you".

Enya has placed her voice up front and in the center in Amarantine. Gone are layers of multi-vocals that have marked her sound in the past. Yes, they are there, but mostly as supporting choruses. She's also cut the reverb on her vocals so that her voice rings out straight and true in a way that it hasn't since Watermark. In terms of straight vocals, her technique reminds me of the ballads from the Watermark and Shepherd Moons era -- her voice, front and center, accompanied by piano or keyboard, perhaps with a touch of strings. This is as close to Enya-Unplugged as I have heard since Shepherd Moons. The greatest risk that Enya may have taken in Amarantine is exposing her single voice so much. It's a rich, mature voice. The vocal promise of her first major album, Enya has blossomed. But, vocal overlays are what Enya is known for -- the wall of Enya sound. How well will her single voice be received?

Instrumentally, there are fewer strings and pizzicato used on Amarantine than in The Memory of Trees and A Day Without Rain. The strings that are there are well balanced with piano, keyboards and percussion. As it has been since Shepherd Moons, Enya is the sole musician--playing every instrument. The 360-degree view of Aigle Studio at The Official Enya Website reveals a Zeta electric cello in the Live Room, some drum pads, and what might be an accordion. One day, perhaps she'll pick up an acoustic guitar, or the uilliean pipes, the clarinet or oboe. The limited range of instruments in her recordings, her insistence on keeping outside musicians out of her music has been commented on by many fans as a weakness in her work. One day, it may catch up with Enya; so far she's managing to avoid it.

There are songs on Amarantine that she could have performed with her older sister, Maire Brennan. The ballads Long Long Journey, It's in the Rain and If I Could Be Where You Are have a folkish feel to them, with It's In the Rain having a surprising almost contemporary C&W sound to it. The very pop sounding Someone Said Goodbye has to be slated as the next single from this recording. In fact, it's so chilled-pop in sound that it could have come off of Eyes of Innocence, the cd recently released by her baby sister, Bridin Brennan.

Trust the Trinity of Enya and Nicky and Roma Ryan to add something new to every recording. Here it is three songs in ... Loxian. There are no songs in Gaelic, Enya's native language, or in Latin or in Spanish on Amarantine There are songs in Loxian -- a language that Roma devised after working on the songs for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings. Strange though they are, the three songs work and are prize pieces in this album. The opening track, Less than a Pearl is a haunting, tragic melody. The River Sings has all the texture and energy of Ebudea from Shepherd Moons. The final cut, Water Shows the Hidden Heartcontains the most beautiful and complicated vocals that Enya has ever done. The vocal overlays are here, and they are done in a majestic fashion. The Loxian language, just as Gaelic in previous recordings, serves as another texture to the music. It hardly matters that, unless you read the lyrics kindly inserted ino a beautiful booklet included with the cd, you have no idea of what she's singing about.

Watermark remains the gold standard, the promise of what Enya could be. It and her first recording, Enya, were made when the world was new and young, when she didn't know if she would last beyond another record or two and then fade into obscurity. Those are Enya's recordings before the world caught up with her, before the strains of fame added layers of caution to the interview responses of a painfully shy young woman determined to maintain her privacy; before stalkers became a reality and bodyguards a way of life. Watermark is the gold standard, but Amarantine is a worthy bookend to it. Play the two of them together; they fit hand in glove. Watermark is the promise; Amarantine is the fulfillment.

©JGLane

Nearly two years after the release of Amarantine, my thoughts haven't changed. It's an unusual recording: more approachable than Shepherd Moons, more personal than The Memory of Trees, more somber than A Day Without Rain. It works.