Songs From A Secret Garden (Polygram) It is not hard to recognise Songs From A Secret Garden as a New Age CD.
The cover features a good-looking blonde couple - musicians Fionnuala Sherry and Rolf Lovland - looking moodily windswept, as if they have just found their inner children wandering around a forest.
And the information pamphlet is full of sunset, tree and flower pictures in vividly impossible colours. This Irish-Norwegian collaboration is dreamy-nature music, forest troll meets Uillean pipe in a confrontation of which the Eurovision Song Contest judges will surely approve.
Although there are some touching musical moments, the orchestral background (provided by the RTE orchestra) or the piano bar intros tend to give a rather bland, soft-focus aspect.
It is romance that is so without edges that it has become a parody of itself; the haunting elements within traditional Irish music have themselves become ghosts.
The choice of the word 'Songs' in the title of this CD is technically correct, but misleading. There are actually only two songs; the other 11 tracks are instrumental. Or perhaps I had the mostly karaoke version without realising it.