If you understand or if you don't

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

06/03/94 : The Cross Of Changes - Enigma


I remember this being wildly successful on the back of a single that caught the public imagination, but I also remember it being a bit new-age hippy-ish so expectations aren't exactly high for this. 

Actually, for the most part that's harsh - the core elements of this aren't a million miles away from Future Sound Of London so there's a lot I actually quite like about it. However, they do like to do some weird whispery vocals from time to time which feels like they're trying to be mysterious (or maybe enigmatic) but it just comes across as annoying. But, as a whole, I'd say it's surprisingly listenable although I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with it - and I've absolutely no idea how it got so popular.

And popular it was, with us being at a surprisingly high #2 in the charts this week on it's third week of a surprisingly long 37 week run, with it having peaked at an astonishing #1 in its debut week - it also came back for another 14 week run in '95. The rest of the top five were Mariah Carey, The Cranberries (a re-entry, exactly a year after it first charted), Sting and Björk with the next highest new entry being St Etienne (#8). 

Wikipedia tells us this is their second album, with their breakthrough having come in '90 with MCMXC a.D. which used Gregorian as opposed to the tribal chants used here. That's pretty much all there is except for telling us that Enigma are a German "musical project" (whatever one of them is) headed up by Michael Cretu. Critically, it was pretty well received but it exceeded things commercially, also getting to #1 in Denmark and New Zealand and hitting a very decent #9 in the US, selling two million copies over there and eight million worldwide.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a quid but if you want the special edition 24 carat gold plated CD it's going to cost you £70 - how pointless does that seem? I have to admit I mostly quite liked this without really understanding what it had that made it stand out from the pack - but it obviously had something because stand out it very much did.

27/02/94 - OK

13/03/94 - Yeah, I liked this

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