Neil Diamond is one of a rare breed. As a songwriter, his music has been covered successfully by artists as diverse as the Monkees, Deep Purple, UB40, and Smash Mouth. But Diamond used that three-chord alchemy to build an unparalleled career as a performer as well. The 38 tracks on these two discs address those interlocking legacies in the most comprehensive manner yet, gathering his material from ...
Moon Safari, the first album proper by this pair of middle-class Frenchmen, easily survives unscathed from its billing as that most deadly of sub-genres: dinner party music. True, Moon Safari, with its blatant bliss-provoking easy listening chimes, sits well beside Everything But the Girl's Walking Wounded or Portishead's Dummy, but the album is steeped in too much ...
Enya's 1988 recording, Watermark, achieved landmark success with her groundbreaking use of multi-tracking technology to fuse new age and Celtic themes and instrumentation. The meticulous production defines her sound and achieves continuity even while weaving together tender ballads, piano pieces, massively layered vocal harmonies and symphonic synthesizer movements. Although Enya's ...