In 1988 I came back from America and even before I got home I had bought Watermark just because I liked the cover. I'd not heard of Enya though I had heard some of her music which was used as the soundtrack to a documentary about The Celts. And I loved it, all of it from the slow and layered choral stuff to the almost-danceable things like Watermark and Cursum Perficio. I was actually listening to it when I saw that Orinoco Flow was number one. It seemed to come out of nowhere. After the next album I began to think that if you had one album, you had them all and so I stopped buying them.
However, supermarket impulse pricing made us buy Enya's latest album - And Winter Came and while some of it is the stuff we all love to put on occasionally to release us from the strings and arrows of modern life, there is a trilogy of great songs starting with the Christmassy White is the Winter Night - a standard evocation of light-through-windows/children singing - a cliche done well and permitted. Second is an icy rendition of O come, O come, Emmanuel. It starts in English but is interrupted by a sudden Chord of voices, almost a rebuke - you silly mononymous person - let's have some Latin - and there it is, beautiful and pure. However, the real gem is the current single Trains and Winter Rains, which as well as having a simple and compulsive rhythm, has an economic use of words to evoke a beautiful cityscape. It reminds me of The Whitsun Weddings or maybe a less-complex version of some of Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. The rest of the album isn't bad either.
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