Music report, part 1

As per kaseido's request, some preliminary remarks on a few albums purchased in my recent iTunes spree:

Amarantine, by Enya--There's something appropriate about the name when I think about how this album sounded to me in comparison to prior Enya albums. It still has her signature mellow feel overall, except that with previous albums, it always came across to me as something soft, like velvet. With this album, it's more like it's been transformed into a crystal, a jewel--what the word 'amarantine' sounds like to me. There are crisper, more distinct edges to her delivery here. I don't have specific track reactions yet, but this is mostly because I wound up listening to the album on the way into work this morning, and I realized only belatedly that listening to Enya on a heated bus on my morning commute before I've had my caffeine is not the wisest thing in the world, if I want to have a coherent reaction to the album. ;) Definitely nice to listen to, though. I'm not sure it's going to top a couple of her earlier albums in my preferences--I really like The Memory of Trees, for example. But I do like it overall.

An Ancient Muse, by Loreena McKennitt--It was very, very good to hear her voice doing something new. She's still got her vocal chops, and the Eastern/Celtic fusion that makes up the overall flavor of the album seemed like a logical extension of her previous albums. "Caravanserai" stood out in particular to me as a notable track, though I've got to give it a few more listens to see if any others seize me as noteworthy.

Musical Evenings With the Captain, Vol. II--I happened to hit this one first out of the classical collections I bought, just because it came up first in the random album rotation on the Not Played Yet playlist. Very nice listening here, though. Some beautiful oboe work on the initial pieces, and there was a brief stretch in one of the later pieces that sounded very, very familiar--I think I remember it showing up somewhere in the Master and Commander soundtrack, or at least something very reminiscent of it. I can't find any of the names of the specific pieces on this album listed in the tracks for the movie soundtrack, so I suspect it was only a snippet or something reminiscent of one rolled into the soundtrack's music. Still, very nice to listen to overall and I'm looking forward to the other two collections.