Search - Loreena McKennitt :: An Ancient Muse

A Visit To My Family Roots

Editor of Lillian's Diaries | Portage,MI | 09/12/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I love Loreena McKennitt both in person and on CD. I come from an English, Irish heritage and her music moves me back centuries to my family roots. I have all her CDs and can listen to them for hours."

Return of the "muse"

E. A Solinas | MD USA | 07/23/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"After the death of her fiance, Loreena McKennitt went into retirement for several years. But when she returned, she came back in a big way -- "An Ancient Muse," a haunting little album filled with Middle-Eastern grandeur and Celtic bittersweet beauty. In other words, McKennitt picked up where she left off, and the years have not dulled the richness of her music.



In a way, the album feels like it follows a day all across Europe and the Middle East. It begins with "Incantation," a slow sunrise of a song filled with murmuring vocals and dark sweeps of strings, before segueing into the lazy half-lit twangs and angles of "The Gates of Istanbul" and the peppy sand-swept ballad of "Caravanserai."



Then McKennitt moves into colder climates with the wistful, string-soaked ballad "The English Ladye and The Knight" (all about a lady in love with a Scottish knight -- cue tragedy), the swirling "Kecharitomene" and the painfully lovely "Penelope's Song." With the final leg of the album, she drifts into the twangy Eastern European flavors of "Sacred Shabbat," the lush twilight tones of "Beneath a Phrygian Sky," and finishing with the soft lulling beauty of "Never-Ending Road (Amhrán Duit)."



"An Ancient Muse" is only nine songs long, but it's one of those albums that feels like a full meal once you've finished it. There are a couple songs that aren't quite brilliant all the time ("Sacred Shabbat" just didn't grab me), but overall McKennit picks up where she left off in the late nineties -- lush multi-instrumental music laced with angelic vocals, flavored with the mystical.



Her music brims over with silky strings, piano, guitar, keyboards, harp, angular accordion and earthy drums, as well as more exotic instruments like the bouzouki, the oud, the Turkish clarinet, the tabla and the lyra. And she evokes some truly spellbinding music with those instruments -- she can bring to life misty forests, Turkish marketplaces, colorful nighttime dances, and stately medieval processions. Although, I heard hints of "The Mummer's Dance" in a couple of the melodies.



Her voice is also incredibly lovely, rich and angelic in all the songs she sings in. Her lyrics are similarly rich -- she seems to make nature itself into a light-filled temple ("The sand was shimmering in the morning light/And dancing off the dunes so far away"), even as she often sings of yearning and lost love ("And in the night when our dreams are still/Or when the wind calls free/I'll keep your heart with mine/Till you come to me").



It took many years for Loreena McKennitt to make a full return to musicmaking, and "The Ancient Muse" is a short but good reminder of why she was worth waiting for. Not quite perfect, but close enough."