CD Review

Artist: Enigma

CD: Seven Lives Many Faces

Release Date: September 19^th, 2008

Record Label: (Virgin/EMI)  

Reviewed by: Gabor Pertic (Toronto Correspondent)

European electro-music pioneers Enigma return with their seventh full-length album with Seven Lives Many Faces and by attempting to stick to their roots of synergizing moody instrumentation with scattered audio samples, the result sounds incredibly dated. For a band that has made great innovations in the new age/trance genre, you would think that the advancements in technology and audio equipment would have allowed them to grow as artists in this massive playground of sound that is available in 2008. Instead of working towards a relevant, modern sound, they attempted to hook into their past and came up with an album that just does not fit anywhere in today’s music scene.

Browsing through the track titles, one can’t help but feel skeptical when track titles include “Touchness” (the bare lyrics do not explain the necessity to make up a cheesy word), “Hell’s Heaven” (oxy-moronic or just moronic?), and “Je T’aime Till My Dying Day (why the dual-language element is here is beyond me). The songs themselves do not serve to clear up the bizarre mish-mash of language as most of the songs sound like they could very well be a backdrop to an amateur post-modern performance art piece (I’m looking at you, “The Same Parents”). The problem then is that you take out the visual aspect of a performance art piece and you are just left with ambient music that loops, going nowhere.

There is a definite lack of interesting crescendos in most of the album as songs like “La Puerta Del Cielo” and the album closer that just won’t close, “The Language of Sound” seem to drag on and provide no builds or movement that would make any track stand out as remotely jarring. Lace that in with laughable, pointless audio samples (the aforementioned “The Same Parents” falls prey to an adjective-filled narration in the background that seems to include all the synonymous for “Amazing”), and the album becomes redundant and forgettable.

There are moments that recall the band that became such a staple of the new age movement, such as the appropriately titled “Déjà Vu”. However these moments are too sparse to make for a cohesive album. The band has not progressed with the times and this album sadly seems like a cheap parody of the genre they became such a seminal influence in.

Track Listing:

1) Encounters – 3:13

2) Seven Lives – 4:25

3) Touchness – 3:36

4) The Same Parents – 5:20

5) Fata Morgana (Instrumental) – 3:24

6) Hell’s Heaven – 3:52

7) La Puerta Del Cielo – 3:28

8) Distorted Love – 4:12

9) Je T’aime Till My Dying Day – 4:19

10) Déjà vu (Instrumental) – 2:56

11) Between Generations – 4:31

12) The Language of Sound – 4:21