Loreena McKennitt: An Ancient Muse

Label: Verve/Universal
Sound/Style: Verve/Universal

Since the dawn of humanity, it's been our nature to make errors in judgment when first impressions outweigh facts. For example, "new age" music has been associated with nature worshipers and smorgasbord spirituality, and is sometimes regarded with suspicion by conservative Christians. Of course, it's prudent to question new age philosophy, but when it comes to music, new age is primarily just a marketing label. As the joke goes, new age music is what you get when you play new age music backwards; in other words, floaty, open-ended noodlings—short on structure and big on meditative mood—are the standard. The best-known and most innovative artists in or around the genre tend to take the biggest and most unjust beatings for the style's worst offenders. Enya, a mesmerizing singer deserving of her success, can rightly be called a new age artist, though she loosely spans the Celtic category. Loreena McKennitt can be found near Enya in the CD bins, but hers is a style rooted more heavily in deep tradition. Her seventh studio album, An Ancient Muse, more or less picks up where 1997's The Book of Secrets left off, and continues her intrepid journey into musicology, anthropology and history.