Elsewhere, meanwhile, Enya lets in a darkness not overly present on The Celts, resulting in work even more appropriate for a moody soundtrack than that album. "Orinoco Flow" itself, for all its implicit dramatics, gently charges instead of piling things on, while the organ-led "On Your Shore" feels like a hushed church piece. (Admittedly, avoiding overblown concerts run constantly on PBS hasn't hurt.) Indeed, the subtlety that characterizes her work at her best dominates Watermark, with the lovely title track, her multi-tracked voice gently swooping among the lead piano, and strings like a softly haunting ghost, as fine an example as any.
She does what she does, just as she did before her fame. To be sure, her success was as much due to marketing a niche audience in later years equally in love with Yanni and Michael Flatley's Irish dancing, but Enya's rarely given a sense of pandering in her work. She’s sold 75 million records by warbling softly over the musical equivalent of someone drumming their knuckles on a coffee table.Thanks to its distinct, downright catchy single "Orinoco Flow," which amusingly referenced both her record-company boss Rob Dickins and co-producer Ross Cullum in the lyrics, Enya's second album Watermark established her as the unexpected queen of gentle, Celtic-tinged new age music. Despite her assurances to The Independentthat she feels like her albums are totally different every time, and that she’s broadly influenced by artists including Green Day and P Diddy, her studio is still very much using synthesizers from 1983, and her voice is as fresh and angelic as e’er it was. Musicians may grow, and evolve, and take their sound in different directions from time to time Enya is not one of them.
But it’s also reassuring in its familiarity. While listening, you may find yourself thinking of the love affair between Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in Far and Away, or of the time Harrison Ford helped the Amish build a barn in Witness, or even of the scene in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo where Stellan Skarsgård decides to play “Orinoco Flow” while he’s torturing Daniel Craig to demonstrate the depths of his sadism. This is, as should be obvious, music from another era.
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