Hi-Res Downloads

96kHz/24-bit FLAC, Warner Music Group 2553131 (supplied by www.highresaudio.com)

Eithne Ní Bhraonáin is back with her eighth set, apparently five years in the making, inspired by the night sky over the small Channel Island of Sark, and nearly 30 years on from her 1988 album Watermark. The good news – for her legions of fans, at least – is that Dark Sky Island sounds every bit an Enya album. The potentially bad news is that it sounds exactly like an Enya album... all swathes of sound and echo-laden vocals against electronic swirls, and I’m not exactly sure the performer has moved on much in the past three decades. Working with long-standing collaborators, producer Nicky Ryan and his lyricist wife Roma, Enya delivers another set that’s just perfect for late-night chill listening, if you like that kind of thing. But the curmudgeon in me would argue she’s not exactly advancing the state of her art. Lush, weighty and very ‘hi-fi’ it may be, and able to flatter almost any system, this album is everything you’d expect. AE

Sound quality: 88%

Hi-Fi News Lab Report

Produced, to the best of my knowledge, on a sophisticated Lawo mc290 consule, the analogue signal chain may add some white noise to the mix (trks 2-5), but I might otherwise have guessed this was a 88.2kHz mix, upsampled to 96kHz... PM