(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. "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. 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. It's a perfect combination of timelessness and technology, an appropriate end to this fine album.Enya's music is primarily about distance: between minutes, between people, between stars. Watermark ends with a fascinating piece, "Na Laetha Geal M'Oige," where fellow Irish modern/traditional fusion artist Davy Spillane adds a gripping, heartbreaking uilleann pipe solo to the otherwise calm synth-based performance. "Cursum Perficio," with her steady chanting-via-overdub of the title phrase, gets more sweeping and passionate as the song progresses, matched in slightly calmer results with the equally compelling "The Longships." "Storms in Africa," meanwhile, uses drums from Chris Hughes to add to the understated, evocative fire of the song, which certainly lives up to its name. 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. 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.
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