Review Summary: A journey to the ancestral self, Enya's "Watermark" has harmony and majesty, being a return to our forgotten musical innocence.
"Watermark" is the peak of the mainstream new-age music. Enya offered the style a pop-face and drew definitive contours that helped in its ulterior evolution. With her splendid mix of richly textured soundscapes, she created a sound that had a definitive resonance on the entire actual musical décor, "Watermark" being an emotional and vaporous painting of the unseen that surrounds our human being and waits to be discovered through an affective composition.
A music that evokes the solemn flow of water and the perpetual silence of a rocky river shore, Enya's new age possesses that innocence lost by the fast pop rhythms, magnifying an imponderability that raises the entire sound to the heights of a prayer. The lush keyboard, accompanied by a soft piano tone, constitutes the perfect backing for Enya’s flowing voice, which gives life to breathe-taking soundscapes.
From the beginning, "Watermark" doesn’t sound like any mainstream album that we are accustomed to. Everything is calm and peaceful; the music doesn’t want to incite or provoke and invites us to float into its charming universe, to enter an unknown time when the main contact with the most distant parts of the world was represented by legends and tales, by the voice that told wondrous stories. The album makes our entrance into an unknown beauty, into an ethereal realm that touches our depths, into a trembling murmur that frightens our interior. It recreates the image of a secluded village by the sea which has a singular way of communicating with the outside world: the fairytales.
When I first listened to the album, I was profoundly touched by the sheer harmony that transcended like a cryptic pulsation through the sound, like a beat making its way into our hearts and minds. It was a music of innocence and an exploration of a lost musical depth. The album wants us to discover the secret rhythm which animated the ancestral inner. Even if this idea initially makes no sense to someone who sees music just as a concrete edifice, it has a sort of foundation. The sound of "Watermark" is widely inspired by the traditional Celtic music, this trait giving an antique dimension. This retrospective character stays in every note and in every rhythm that goes through a register varying from a barely outlined beat to discrete timpani nuances. The main musical role is played by the keyboards, which often sound like windpipes, making an allusion to the character of the Celtic creation. Also, the record presents a well-articulated correlation with the Catolic music. The Gregorian-inspired harmonies blend the pagan Celtic sound with the modern civilization, transporting the ancestral approach into modern times and underlining the meaning of the "new age" term.
With this palette of ideas and suggestions, "Watermark" defines a musicality that was essentially lost from the late-eighties’ point of view. In the musical amalgam represented by the development of house, indie-rock, and rap music, the record’s wisdom makes a return to the ear’s chastity. It’s accessible for everyone who wants a taste from the minor key splendor lost with the perpetual metamorphosis of rock. Contrary to some critical opinions, "Watermark" has more to offer than the hit-single "Orinoco Flow". Finally, the entire album presents an exuberant ascension of nuances and gives a new definition to the traditional harmonies. With the image of the evening's fall, "Watermark" leads us to a land of the shadows of our forgotten selves, where we find the beautiful mystery that we left behind.
