Enya: Dark Sky Island

It can be difficult to differentiate between Enya records. 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. 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. Dark Sky Island is her first album in five years, since 2008's Christmas-themed collection ...And Winter Came. 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. Her albums generate a very specific environment, one which envelops the listener regardless of the quality of her individual songs.

Enya's music is primarily about distance: between minutes, between people, between stars. Her songs stretch accordingly, synthesizers advancing and receding within them like shadows. Sometimes her music seems to move with the velocity of a glacier. Drums are employed sparingly. 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. There are also sudden clusters of sampled timpani in her music, but they provide shape to her songs more than they provide any animation. The way she constructs her music out of samples gives her otherwise warm and amniotic compositions a kind of Arctic and alien dimension.

Her songs feel sharper on Dark Sky Island than they have in years. Its textures are glassier; the individual sampled string hits on "Echoes in Rain" sound like arthritic branches sprouting from a frozen earth. The ballads are heartbreaking. "I Could Never Say Goodbye" and "So I Could Find My Way" describe an incredible distance that can't be collapsed; in the case of "So I Could Find My Way", that distance is the vastness between life and death. (She wrote it about her producer Nicky Ryan's mother.) Elsewhere she (somewhat invisibly) experiments; in "Sancta Maria" a synthesizer collides gently against more classical instruments in a way that seems to clarify each. She sings several interstellar ballads in Loxian, a language her lyricist Roma Ryan invented, though the language is mainly experienced on record as a blur of vowels. (These "experiments" of course merge seamlessly with the rest of her work; they're composed of the same glossy surfaces and drift through identical rhythms.)

Her first two albums, Enya and Watermark, are much more digressive and rhythmically diverse than her later work, including Dark Sky Island; for every gentle, shapeless ballad, there would be exercises in more precise, classical forms, or a song would unfold into a more distracted rhythm. Most of her songs since have been subject to a merciless symmetry. She drifts somewhat out of her aesthetic on Dark Sky Island's "Even in the Shadows", which pulses like an artery from the double bass playing of Eddie Lee; as a result, it's one of the best songs on the record. But it matters little. Though her approach has calcified, the environments generated by her records are still singular, a gentle, untroubled, indefinite ambience that is very soothing to inhabit. It's like being embraced by the air.