Cake Day/Good Grief Day/Buy Nothing Day (UK)/Lighted Christmas Parade (New Mexico)/College Fraternity Day
2005-11-26 @ 3:34 p.m.

On further listening, I conclude that Amarantine suffers from an astounding sense of monotony. The only interruption is The River Sings, which has a percussion beat that sounds like it came from an ordinary trance track. I've decided that I could grow to like about half the album, but not as much as her earlier work. Amarantine has incredibly banal lyrics, even for a New Age track. What kind of a chorus is "Amarantine...Amarantine...Amarantine...Love is. Love is. Love..."? It's In The Rain isn't bad, exploring Enya's lower vocal range, which happens frequently in this album. Forgettable melody though. Ditto for Long Long Journey, which sounds to me like an echo of Anywhere Is, just not as successful. Sumiregusa is quirky, which saves it from being dismissed as a filler track. Drifting is the only instrumental, and it's like most of her instrumentals, which is to say that it's nice, not just as good as its predecessors. The English translation for Water Shows The Hidden Heart reads like the Enya equivalent of Frost's Directive, and is actually listenable. Overall, she's done better though, and if anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or deluded. Incidentally, I uncovered an old short story I wrote in June 2003 for an English assignment. You can read it here. It's not particularly good, I think, but for an opening chapter, it might actually be workable.