The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @brendonbouzard for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
Enya wasn’t cool. Enya was a punchline for so long, and for the most boring reasons: because your aunt — the one who got really into tea after her divorce — liked her. Because they played her music at that cafe by your office that had mandalas on the wall and put “chai lattes” on the menu before Starbucks did.
Enya wasn’t cool, especially in 1991, because earnestness was seen as a sign of weakness. The number one ranked album in this tournament is Nevermind, and I doubt there’s a single album in the tournament that’s more sonically or philosophically opposed to the world-weary gaze of a song like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” than Enya’s Shepherd Moons.
Nirvana was cool. Enya wasn’t cool.
But what is cool?
Cool is leaving a band filled with your older siblings and cousins — an established, world-touring act — at the age of 21 because you think you can push the basic concept of their sound (a contemporary gloss on Celtic folk) toward new, innovative directions.
Cool is folding in the influences of 1970s and 1980s German kosmische into your sound in subtle, exciting ways: stealing synth patches from Tangerine Dream and Software. It’s multi-tracking your vocals in impenetrable, otherworldly swirls. Compare the density of vocal tracking on this album to the guitars on MBV’s Loveless. It’s understanding and studying the value of texture, drawing in influence from ambient pioneers like Brian Eno and Laraaji.
Cool is being such an insane perfectionist that you refuse to tour, leaving literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, because you know a live performance won’t be able to capture the intricacy of what you put on record. Instead you just hole up in your castle with the two collaborators you’ve worked with for four decades, creating supernatural mood music that takes years to gestate and perfect.
Shepherd Moons is one of Enya’s finest hours. Though it fits under the broad genre of “new age” music, it explores a lot of ideas within that rubric. There are moving arrangements of classic Irish folk and dolorous instrumental invocations of fantasy literature. There’s “Caribbean Blue” — an ethereal pop song that stands among the greatest triumphs in the “new age” genre. And there’s “Afer Ventus” — a swirl of vocals and synths so thick it verges on pure abstraction.
It might not be cool, but it’s so much better than cool.
