Its textures are glassier the individual sampled string hits on 'Echoes in Rain' sound like arthritic branches sprouting from a frozen earth. Her songs feel sharper on Dark Sky Island than they have in years. The way she constructs her music out of samples gives her otherwise warm and amniotic compositions a kind of Arctic and alien dimension. There are also sudden clusters of sampled timpani in her music, but they provide shape to her songs more than they provide any animation. Either her vocal is the rhythmic engine of the songs (as in 'Orinoco Flow', or on this album, 'Echoes in Rain') or the rhythm is organized into arpeggios that sound like crystal, and which are often generated from a Roland Juno 60 synthesizer. Sometimes her music seems to move with the velocity of a glacier. Her songs stretch accordingly, synthesizers advancing and receding within them like shadows. Her albums generate a very specific environment, one which envelops the listener regardless of the quality of her individual songs.Įnya's music is primarily about distance: between minutes, between people, between stars. I can say with some confidence that it's her best record since 1995's The Memory of Trees, but I'm not certain if that means anything to anyone, including myself. Dark Sky Island is her first album in five years, since 2008's Christmas-themed collection. But as her career advanced her songwriting and the architecture of her albums solidified into a kind of extreme aesthetic discipline, and her songs began to melt inextricably into each other. Her early work still feels only slightly displaced from 4AD and ambient music though Enya has never been comfortable identifying her music as 'new age,' it shares new age's fixations on geology and infinity, which also appear in the music of contemporary acts, from Oneohtrix Point Never to Mark McGuire. It can be difficult to differentiate between Enya records.

Enya album cover memory of trees