The Cross Of Changes

ENIGMA: “The Cross Of Changes” (Virgin)

IT’S A colour-by-numbers gameplan; what every sucker’d give his right arm to have thought of first. Seven million copies of MCMXC A.D. down the road and Enigma are on a roll. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” might well be their modus operandi – and who can blame them? If recycled, resynthesised spirituality is what the punter wants why not give it to him? God sells – by the spadeful.

If the truth be told I have to admit that ‘Mea Culpa’ had me hooked too. Anything that combines mantric chanting with a good lashing of self-flagellation is a boon in a country creaking at the knees under the weight of Catholic guilt. Ditto ‘Sadeness’. The sort of stuff that could be packaged happily as the soundtrack to a Spike Milligan guide to depression, or something.

But alas, Enigma’s taste in soundtracks veers more towards the sordid and the patently voyeuristic. Proudly proclaiming that ‘Age Of Loneliness’ is the main theme from the Sharon Stone mutant Sliver, Rumanian mainman Michael Cretu seems to be equally at home in a Ceaucescu-like den of iniquity as in a chapel.

Still, there’s much in The Cross Of Changes to satisfy the priestly palate, the monastic mien. The trademark taster single ‘Return To Innocence’ encompasses a Peter Gabriel-like taste for ethnic mixing with a power ballad intro that Bryan Adams’d kill for. As for ‘Silent Warrior’, it betrays a strange and unlikely kinship with Led Zeppelin, circa the mid-’70s, when axemanship equalled what Samuel Snort might delicately refer to as down home poontang. Yes, Enigma aren’t shy of tossing in the odd musical phallus by way of a creaking and caoining synthesised guitar to enliven the (admittedly sombre) proceedings.

So far, so what? The Cross Of Changes carries on where MCMXC A.D. left off. If we’re to believe Cretu it’s an ode to the fine art of self-examination, a cookbook for the soulsearcher, if you will.

Whatever it is, it’s still elevator music to me. Mantovani, come back, all is forgiven.

• Siobhán Long