Word: gaelicism
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...seem to delight in weaving songs that are slightly consciousness-altering. Call it folk-rock, call it New Age, in the end it'll get to you all the same. Whether it relies on the contorted world-view of Twin Peaks' David Lynch, as with Julee Cruise, or Gaelic-inspired words and melodies, as with Enya, this music shares a certain soulfulness that sets it apart. Showing up in soundtracks, advertisements and as background music to certain popular women's winter sporting events, these artists' combination of cryptic lyrics, cool synth sound and sighing vocals have made a market...
They are, in fact, the adorable inheritors of a threatened Irish subculture, that of the Travellers, or Celtic Gypsies. It is their grandfather, who continues to follow the old, threatened ways, who brings the animal he calls ! Tir na nOg (Land of Eternal Youth in Gaelic) to them in the unhappy Dublin housing project where they live with their father (Gabriel Byrne), who abandoned his free-roving heritage after his wife's death...
...empire. Artists know that ancestral tongues or patois, even when they survive, could not reach a wide audience, while English puts them on a world stage. When John Millington Synge wanted to portray hatred of England's dominance in his native Ireland, he nonetheless wrote in English rather than Gaelic. When Mustapha Matura depicts his native Trinidad, he uses English -- indeed, he has lived in England since 1961 -- although his plays acknowledge that it is the language of past slavery and present subordination to foreign culture...
...Irish quartet CLANNAD (whose lead singer, Maire Brennan, is Enya's sister) and an album, Anam, that has all the right career moves: a duet with U2's Bono, a song from the hit movie Patriot Games. The group merits a listen. Brennan's soprano keenings, in English and Gaelic, are variously backed by cool, Sergio Mendes-style harmonies, a bluesy sax, and a guitar's banshee wailing. But in the tune Harry's Game, Clannad goes spare and liturgical, transmuting New Age tonal banality into ageless, ethereal beauty. If you ever ascend to heaven, this is the music...
ENYA: SHEPHERD MOONS (Reprise). Gaelic music of a different sort. Enya sounds like Sinead O'Connor after an overdose of chill pills; her songs seem, at first hearing, like the ideal background for stores that sell granola and wind chimes. But hang in. Enya mixes New Age with space age and Irish mysticism, and there is supple witchery here...