Enigma: Voyageur

Reviewed by GRAHAM REID

Herald rating: *

If Enigma's "sound designer" Michael Cretu keeps doing it, critics will keep saying it. He has been a musical tourist appropriating interesting sounds and approaches to dilute down and make palatable and marketable.

It's worked, too. People, God forgive them, gobble up Enigma albums, possibly because they sounded like inoffensive advertising soundtracks.

No shock of the new with an Enigma album, just the aural equivalent of a food alley, slightly exotic in character but ultimately tasteless.

This time, the multimillion-selling concept Enigma -- Cretu, his wife, his studio, a couple of others -- perpetrate a kind of unmemorable, up-beat ambient sound.

He says they don't sound like anything else on the planet, but he's either not listening or he's lying. Music to type to. Or better, ignore.