Age of Innocence (1993)

Enigma’s complete catalogue is set for a special coloured vinyl makeover. On 4 May, Universal Music will release The Colours Of Enigma – The Vinyl Series: all eight studio albums and the acclaimed hits package LSD Love Sensuality Devotion: The Greatest Hits as strictly limited edition coloured vinyl. Five of these albums will be released for the first time on vinyl: Le Roi Est Mort. Vive Le Roi (1996), The Screen Behind The Mirror (2000), Voyageur (2003), A Posteriori (2006) and Seven Lives Many Faces (2008). Only the debut MCMXC a.D (1990), which spent over 200 weeks in the US Top 200 Billboard charts, 1993’s The Cross Of Changes and the latest album The Fall Of A Rebel Angel (2016) enjoyed releases on wax previously.

Enigma is a German musical project founded in 1990 by Romanian-German musician and producer Michael Cretu. Cretu had released several solo records, collaborated with various artists, and produced albums for his then wife, German pop singer Sandra, before he conceived the idea of a New Age, Worldbeat project. He recorded the first Enigma studio album, MCMXC a.D. (1990), with contributions from David Fairstein and Frank Peterson. The album remains Enigma's biggest, helped by the international hit single, "Sadeness (Part I)", which sold 12 million units alone. According to Cretu, the inspiration for the creation of the project came from his desire to make a kind of music that did not obey "the old rules and habits" and presented a new form of artistic expression with mystic and experimental components.

Cynics might roll their eyes at the album's title – there is nothing at all edgy about this duo's buffed-to-a-high-gloss music – but The New Edge is actually one of Acoustic Alchemy's most entertaining releases. There's a playfulness to these tunes, like the puckish electronic drums on the flamenco-tinged and downright catchy "Notting Hill Two-Step" and the tongue-in-cheek boulevardier pretensions of the closing "Rive Gauche," that suggests a pair of sharp wits behind the well-packaged sheen of this music. The songs are a consistently memorable lot this time out, with a much higher than usual ratio of interesting melodies to snoozy new age mush, and the production, for once, is not so Velveeta-smooth that the record actually becomes hard to listen to.