The first album, MCMXC AD, was a popular soundtrack to fetish parties in the early Nineties – no surprise, given the nature of the recording – and there’s a sensuality running through each recording. Instead, the Enigma albums seem to exist in their own unique space, where they allow the listener to float away into a different world, very much at the fore of your consciousness. They are a curious conundrum – not records you can ideally split into individual tracks on an iPod shuffle, not something you might listen to in the way you would a rock or pop record, but also not the ambient background music of the new age or chill-out album. And while each album is made up of several tracks, they are all really single pieces – musically, if not lyrically conceptual and closer to film soundtracks than any sort of traditional album, with the tracks seamlessly flowing into each other. But that’s not so awful – each stands up on its own as a solid piece of music.
Instead, you become acutely aware of their similarities in a way that would still be obvious, but wouldn’t be a critical issue, if you were playing these over a few weeks, let alone hearing them over a thirteen-year period as they were originally released.Īdmittedly, many of these albums could have been recording in the same sessions. It’s a problem simply because it becomes hard to judge each of these albums as a separate piece. So the fact that you are essentially hearing variations on the same theme over five LPs becomes a lot more obvious here that it might do with some rock band who already sound like a whole bunch of their contemporaries. Most bands, of course, have a sound that they might only vary from to slight degrees, but few of those bands have such an immediately distinctive and recognisable sound as this act, less a band and more a creative project for producer Michael Cretu. The problem with reviewing five Enigma albums back to back is that after a while, they all begin to blur into one. Exploring the erotic, hypnotic and chilled-out ambience of Enigma.
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