Product Description

An album by Enya has always been an event, rather than just another record release. Yet seldom has any new album been as keenly anticipated as Amarantine.

In the five years since Enya’s last album, A Day Without Rain, which also spent a phenomenal two years on the billboard chart, Enya has been recording the brand new album in Ireland with her longstanding partnership of producer/arranger Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan. The result is Enya’s most rounded and fully realised work to date.

Track Listing

1. Less Than A Pearl
2. Amarantine
3. It's In The Rain
4. If I Could Be Where You Are
5. The River Sings
6. Long Long Journey
7. Sumiregusa
8. Somebody Said Goodbye
9. A Moment Lost
10. Drifting
11. Amid The Falling Snow
12. Water Shows The Hidden Heart

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12082 in Music
• Released on: 2005-11-21
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
From the first blanket of choral voices awash in reverb, Amarantine is instantly recognizable as a product of Enya, the Irish chanteuse who has created a genre unto herself. Although it's been five years since her last CD, on Amarantine it's as if time stood still. The triumvirate of Enya, lyricist Roma Ryan, and producer Nicky Ryan work the formula they perfected on Watermark, layering her voice in lush choirs pushed along by pizzicato synth strings, swooning orchestral pads, and harpsichord arpeggios. On tracks like "Less Than a Pearl" and "Drifting," Enya flirts with a timeless sound born in gothic chants and hymns. The former is one of three songs that she sings in Roma Ryan's fictitious language of Loxian. It seems to free her, especially on "The River Sings," a veritable rave-up where she gets the tribal choir going in the style of Scottish mouth music. But to get there you have to slog through slo-mo ballads that manage to be dirge-like and singsong at the same time, like the Carpenters on Quaaludes. The relatively restrained arrangement of "It's in the Rain" almost attains a folk-like simplicity that Enya hasn't experienced since she sang with her siblings in Clannad a quarter-century ago. Amarantine sounds like it was born in cloistered solitude, self-referentially echoing Enya albums past. --John Diliberto

More Enya:

The Celts	Watermark	Shepherd Moons
The Memory of Trees	A Day Without Rain	Paint the Sky with Stars: The Best of Enya

Customer Reviews

'Being Conned'
I received the CD in the post (eventually) in a red velvet box and thought that this would be great...especially the second CD. Unfortunately, the box only contained the one CD and a book....what happened to the missing CD - I only bought this because of the additional CD....I feel that I have been conned and I can't return the CD can I ? Suggest that you think twice before buying this CD.

Anarantine box
This is a must have for any Enya fan.The photos of Enya are fab and the book Water show the hidden heart is amazing. Plus the music is the real treat. Great christmas gift. Cheers

Disappointing after such a long wait...

A disappointing album after such a terribly long wait... Amarantine barely touches the surface of her preceding masterpiece (and possibly her greatest ever work) 'A Day Without Rain'. This is only Enya's second album in almost a decade!

This set of songs, though have the same classic vocals, does not open with the best track, which doesn't help in getting this album off to a good start. The second - the title track is one of only a handful of songs worthy of any real acclaim... The third song: 'It's In The Rain' is by far the nearest she reaches to the tremendous quality she gave us, and that is unmistakably 'A Day Without Rain', and I suspect she wrote both these tracks first, and not long after completing her last album.

Granted that Enya has never released a bad album until now, but I guess it was going to be some amazing feat indeed to even think of topping 'A Day Without Rain', but after more than half a decade of waiting, we did perhaps expect better than this, or something that would at least compete. Harsh words I know, but it is difficult to be charitable after such tremendous anticipation.

'The River Sings' is distinctly out of place on this album, and almost sounds as if it's put there to simply fill in a gap, it's so meaningless... This album is so unremarkable, I sometimes have to remind myself that I have it in my collection... At times on playing, I feel it is as bland and as unimaginative as the artwork used in the packaging when compared to her previous works. It's as if Enya here is 'stuck' as to what to write after such perfection with 'A Day Without Rain'. The track 'Drifting' is also reminiscent of the aforementioned album, and could have been 'Silver Inches II'.

Without the referred to highlights to support it, this album would have been a flop - simply not one of her best works... Whereas her previous album turned out to be well worth every day of the five year wait; this was not, and thus makes me nervous about her future releases...

Come on Enya - we all know you are capable of much better than this!


Highlights on this album are: Amarantine, It's In The Rain, Someone Said Goodbye, A Moment Lost and Amid The Falling Snow.