If you have a Spotify or any other music streaming service that lets you listen to entire albums in one go, I've got some homework for you.
Once I began to wean myself off of radio as my primary source for new music, I turned to the only other place one could go to find new stuff - the record store. I wandered into one not long after moving to Calgary and heard this ethereal voice over industrial flavoured synths and asked a worker what I was hearing. It was the new album from Delerium, Semantic Spaces.
Listening to the album now, I'm struck by the cheesiness of it all, it smells so much of the early 90s. But the two men behind Delerium (Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber) were moving on from their industrial roots and venturing into the territory established by Enigma from France. Based in Vancouver, Delerium enlisted the talented female singer Kristy Thirsk to elevate their new sound. But like I said, Semantic Spaces was just the boys shaking things out as far as I'm concerned. Even though it was their seventh album to date, it's their first under the Nettwerk label. It's in their next Nettwerk label album, Karma, that things really come together. I'm intentionally skipping Spheres II, as it wasn't a Nettwerk release.
Even though Karma sounds more like Enigma than the previous album, the boys made use of a wider variety of vocalists, including Kristy again, but this time also recruiting Sarah McLachlan, Lisa Gerrard, Jacqui Hunt and Camille Henderson. They even recorded a 30-piece choir in a West Vancouver church to avoid the cost of getting the rights of existing church choir recordings.
It all begins on track one, Enchanted. The atmospheric soundtrack transports you to another place, maybe Asia. The industrial mood is still there, but the world music flavour of the chants tames it, makes it far more accessible. I do find the vocals a little on the cheesy side, but the track tries not to take itself too seriously. It's the pace setter.
On Duende, the world music prevails, but now the beat feels industrial while East Indian instruments round out the sound. Here we're introduced to the buttery voice of Camille Henderson. Heavily produced, but moving along at a nice clip. This makes both for great driving music and background music at a party.
Next we are transported to some lush jungle in instrumental Twilight. The synth melodies really shine on this track with absolutely no need for vocals at all.
Then we are visited by Sarah McLachlan. Silence charted quickly, reaching number one in Ireland and Scotland and top ten in much of Europe and North America. This song kind of makes you wonder if the other vocalists threw down the gauntlet and Sarah came to show them how it's done. Regardless of how she got involved in Silence, you can't imagine anyone else pulling it off.
Forgotten Worlds and Lamentation is where the choir provides most of the vocal texturing.
Euphoria would not feel out of place on Semantic Spaces if you removed the world voice chants and throat singing. This is where we hear Jacqui Hunt for the first time. Again, don't try to find any deep meaning in the lyrics. It's about the mood, not the message.
Wisdom brings Kirsty back for a bit more angelic musings before a couple more songs finish the album.
In all seriousness, if you're looking to give your speakers a good test, from the lowest synth bass pedals to soaring voices from the world's best female vocalists, you could do much worse than to test drive this thematic sampling of mid-90s worldbeat.
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