It’s a soundtrack for a land where time drifts slowly, after all! The first chunk of the commercial tries to fool you into this, listing “Sail Away” not just once but twice in the first 30 seconds of track listing, and the visual imagery of foaming waves and darkly flickering candles suggests music for a particularly macabre day spa.īut one might also be totally wrong. One might assume that, with those two songs at the helm, the rest of Pure Moods would be in the same vein of mystically orchestral and reverb-drenched females chanting nonwords. Enya Brennan is the well-known Irish singer and songwriter behind zillions of mystical, folk-inspired ballads that have appeared chiefly in movies whose middle words are “ of the.” Adiemus (the band) is a conglomeration of musicians led by composer Karl Jenkins that produced multiple “vocalise-style albums” that mash together classical, gospel, African, and “world” music traditions to produce tracks that you recognize either from Delta Airlines commercials or from, well, Pure Moods. The anchors of the of the whole collection are two of the most recognizable songs in the popular-New-Age canon: “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” by Enya, whose video the Pure Moods people seemed to have ripped off entirely for their album art, and the single “Adiemus” by the eponymous … Adiemus. But it’s the original, the purest of Pure Moods that many of us remember from seeing this ad as children during the Nickelodeon afternoon programming block (?) and can now sing all the snippets of the songs in order, even the ones that don’t have actual lyrics. The Pure Moods brand, according to Wikipedia, spans over 10 total CD compilations, including Celtic Moods, Christmas Moods, and the vaguely Paganistic Pure Moods: Celestial Celebration. Pure Moods seems to have been an attempt to corner a lucrative “new age” market, targeting the kind of people who do dream of a world where unicorns prance, ‘80s-style headdresses are all the rage at weddings, and will believe “direct from Europe” and “multi-platinum” constitute a legitimate musical pedigree.
So called “direct response television commercials” for CD collections like this were a staple of cable advertising for the last 20 years: sold more on overall aesthetic than on specific songs, they were usually the first step in a mail-order (remember 800-numbers?!) and had price points that invariably ended in 99 cents (except for the obviously inferior 98, or, heaven forbid, 97 cent offerings). Masterful parody of PURE MOODS from the 10-year-old ? /L7AJcjClwOĪnd this is why you shop at your local record store.“Imagine a world where time drifts slowly, a world where music carries you away…” He even went so far as to make a parody of the compilation called Cringe Moods: We started reciting some of the lines around the house. He got really into it, especially the infomercial. I thought it would be hilarious to play my 10-year-old the album after pizza night. “Plural! There is no one mood, but they’re all Pure.” “But what mood?” Meg asked me after I played her a few tracks. The model, deemed “a huge buzz” after selling more than 2 million copies prior to its formal drop, would be replicated five times over with a tetralogy of sequels in the releases of Pure Moods II-IV. Their clunky but satisfying cohesion can be attributed to the cataloguing done by the Virgin heads, who arranged the piece on a lark, “stumbling into the project” as an experiment to determine if an album could be successfully telemarketed and sold far before its release date. These were tracks and artists never designed to be played alongside one another, tracks and artists, for all intents and purposes, mostly foreign to one another except in essence. Luckily, Mina Tavakoli wrote a great review for Pitchfork a few years ago that delves into its weird history: I wanted to know more about this crazy artifact from 1994. I didn’t even bother looking at the tracklist until I got home - sure, there was Enya and Kenny G, but also Morricone, Vangelis, Badalamenti and Brian Eno?!? This thing is wild: The minute I saw the cover, I remembered that “Return to Innocence” song blasting during the infomercials:
PURE MOODS 4 ALBUM SONGS FREE
“Imagine…a world…where time drifts slowly…”įor laughs, I pulled this copy of Pure Moods out of the free box while record shopping at End of an Ear.
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