| This four-CD box set of the most popular new age-pop crossover artist is in many ways a fine compilation of her output through the early twenty-first century, though it's not without shortcomings. The plus side will be more than enough for many Enya fans: 51 songs on four discs, spanning the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, mostly taken from the five albums she issued during that period (there is nothing, incidentally, from her recordings as part of Clannad). In fact, this package contains most of the songs from those albums. It has virtually (though not quite) everything from Watermark, Shepherd Moons, and A Day Without Rain, with The Celts and The Memory of Trees less heavily (though still substantially) represented. To the unconverted, it could be argued that it would be a reasonable substitute for buying the individual albums, given the similarities between her albums over time. It's a more troubling question, though, as to why consumers (and there are many) who already have the five core albums might be tempted by this box. There's the lush gold and velvet cover, and an enhanced video clip of her performing "Oiche Chiun (Silent Night)" on the BBC television program Christmas Day in the Morning, but there's not much in the way of customary box set extras. The playing time, adding up to about 175 minutes, is not generous for a four-CD set; the material could have easily fit into three discs, or better yet, more songs could have been put on each CD. The large in-bound booklet has lyrics, plenty of photos, and extensive comments on the songs by Enya herself, but nothing in the way of a conventional biography of her career. Most troubling, though, is the absence of any information on the original release dates and sources of the seven tracks on the box that didn't appear on the five original albums (for the record, these were largely taken from singles and soundtracks, and none of them were previously unreleased). Perhaps it's true that Enya and/or new age fans generally care less about such matters than fans of other kinds of popular music do. But some such fans undoubtedly do care, and in a gaudy and expensive career retrospective, this is the kind of flaw that's not easy to overlook. | |