Enya Day Without Rain CD

Solo performer: Enya (vocals, various instruments).
A DAY WITHOUT RAIN won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best New Age Album.
Enya's first full-length album of new material in five years (and her fourth in 12 years) will have a familiar sound to the millions who have followed her career so far. As usual, the slow songs sound like "Silent Night" being performed in a cathedral, and the less slow songs are paced by rhythm patterns that would be called pizzicato passages if they were being played on real strings instead of string-like synthesizers. Over the music, Enya sings in her multi-tracked, ethereal voice, making Roma Ryan's lyrics, which are full of pastoral imagery and abstract romantic sentiments, seem even more insubstantial than they already are. In the press materials accompanying the release, Enya explains why it took her five years to come up with less than 34 and a half minutes of music that sounds like most of her earlier music by noting that she plays all the instruments and does all the singing herself without using samples. It might be more accurate to say that there is no need for her to release albums any more frequently than she does, since each one sells over a long period of time. And since her listeners are more concerned with the mood she sets than with musical content, the similarity to her other albums is a good thing. This is music that works almost entirely as a surface pleasure; strip it of its pretensions, and it's just contemporary easy listening music. ~ William Ruhlmann
Celtic songbird Enya is nothing if not consistent--A DAY WITHOUT RAIN won't disappoint anyone who was entranced by her first major hit "Orinoco Flow." The same blend of adult-contemporary pop, Celtic overtones, and peaceful, new age-derived ambience fills these songs. Enya knows how to set a mood, and she takes her time establishing the themes here; the title cut that opens the album doesn't even have any words, just Enya's harmoniously overdubbed humming.
Speaking of overdubs, Enya sang and played every single thing on A DAY WITHOUT RAIN herself, demonstrating both an impressive versatility and a remarkable steadiness of vision. With the (seemingly) sampled timpani and strings that adorn much of the album, some of the cuts here simply scream "film soundtrack," as if they're just waiting to be snatched up by James Cameron for his next epic film and embedded forever in the public consciousness.