Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazing talent, 29 Jul 2006
Anyone fortunate enough to have heard Helios's previous album 'Unomia' as well as the 'corduroy road' album under his Goldmund moniker will probably be expecting great things from this album & rightly so. Clearly Keith Kenniff is a huge talent when it comes to Electronica as well as being a very accomplished pianist & guitarist. This kind of mix of electronic & acoustic instruments is nothing new these days. Lots of artists are doing it with varying degrees of success. But with Eingya, Helios has created a blend that sounds so beautiful, harmonious & perfect that it defies belief. It sounds so natural, unpretentious & accomplished that it will make you smile from ear to ear! Never before have acoustic instruments (namely piano & guitar) sat so well with their electronic counterparts. It really is very special.
What's more the album works incredibly well as an album. That may sound a bit daft but all to often albums can sound more like collections of tracks, rather than a proper album, without any flow or coherence between tracks. I'm happy to say that Eingya works incredibly well as an album & as such it's difficult to pick out highlights - Everything here is so good. The opening track 'Bless this morning year' is one of the best things I've heard in ages. Incredibly this quality continues throughout the album. 'For years & years' is another incredibly beautiful track. 'The toy garden' sounds like a nod towards the Electronica of yester-year but it's as effortlessly beautiful as everything else on offer here.
I can't recommend this album highly enough. It's genre defining as well as boundary crossing all at the same time. One of the best things I've heard in recent years & in my opinion completely essential. Buy this & then buy Unomia & Corduroy road for 3 of the best albums of beautiful & infinitely listenable music of recent years.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
like voices on the tapes that we made....., 20 May 2008
Its a sad, sad world in which we live, when an album as heartbreakingly beautiful as this has only one measly review on here. Oh well, maybe this isn't the place for it anyway.
A few words then.
Mogwai, Godspeed, Aeriel M, Tortoise amongst others all got me hooked in the late 90s. As well as this you had lovely electronica being created by Boards of Canada, ISAN, The Remote Viewer, Hood etc. An exiting time to be getting into music I reckon, though by no means was this mirrored in the commercial world (what a foul place that is anyway...).
Anyway, soon into the new millennium, I heard these sounds replicated and driven into the ground by lesser talents and less creative minds (I won't name names), in short I'd lost most of my faith in what could loosely be called Post Rock/electronica. Then I heard this album and I was floored totally by its exquisite lovliness.
Its the depth of detail in each piece, the rhythms that seemed to be derived from table tops, the bark from trees or the stomp of a foot in a dusty old hall coupled with the most heartbreaking reverberating electric guitar lines and acoustic picking. Add to this the dreamlike, faded and degraded ambient fogs that drift in and out of the album at points like long forgotten memories of lost summers and lost loves.
This is the best instrumental album of this Millennium in my opinion and will never appear in any top 100 albums or anything like that, because this is real folk music. For the few of us that still remain as untainted by this awful world as we can (its a hard fight) this album provides comfort and warmth.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impossibly beautiful..., 16 Sep 2008
This is one my favourite albums by anyone ever... I'm not a religious man, but I can't help thinking that this is the kind of music that they play in heaven... This album is a spectacular collection of impossibly beautiful tracks; it engages, rewards and comforts with each listen. Keith Kenniff, the man behind this album, has an immeasurable gift for making music... check out his many other excellent releases, including some ridiculously good records released under his Goldmund guise. I highly, highly recommend this album - five stars is not quite enough.
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