David Arkenstone, The Celtic Book of Days (Windham Hill Records, 1998)
I am by no means the most musically knowledgable member of the GMR staff -- in fact, Stephen Hunt, our beloved Assistant Music Editor, despairs of curing me of my affection for "dodgy metal and blokes with mullets" -- but I do know derivative schlock when I hear it. This attempt to pass off overproduced, lifeless, New Age drivel as Celtic music is an insult to both the tradition and to the many talented artists who play the real thing.
I realized when I first looked at the liner notes that The Celtic Book of Days was an experiment gone horribly wrong. The preface to the notes explains :
To each season, each festival, were its own songs and dances, its own legends and lore, all held in the minds of the Wise and a few precious pages. Here, in music and prose, the tradition lives again; herein find wonder and magic and the great circle of the year, in a Celtic Book of Days.
This is all fine and good, except that David Arkenstone and Mercedes Lackey (who wrote the Celtic lore for the liner notes) apparently decided to change the great circle of the year into the great jigsaw puzzle of the year. The album contains 15 songs representing the 8 holidays of the pagan year, which last time I checked actually follows the seasons pretty closely. However, The Celtic Book of Days begins with Spring Equinox (March), moves on to Autumn Equinox (September), jumps backward to Summer Solstice (June), then forward to Lughnasad (August), back again to Beltane (May), forward to Samhain (October), forward again to Candlemas (February), and finally back again to Winter Solstice (December). Huh?
Then there is the music itself. In an interview published online on the Barnes & Noble web site, Arkenstone says "To prepare for Celtic Book of Days, I listened to a lot of Celtic music: traditional, The Chieftains, fiddle, pipes, whistles. What is it made out of? I dissect it and study it...It is like being an ethnomusicologist, but I take what I like and add it to my emotional response." Well, I didn't hear anything remotely influenced by The Chieftains, but it's pretty hard to listen to this music and not recognize what sounds a whole lot like Bill Whelan's Riverdance -- with the charm and heart removed, but Riverdance nonetheless. And while the liner notes indicate that Arkenstone and his stable of musicians use many instruments including guitar, mandolin, melodica, bodhran, and Uillean pipes, I have to say that my husband's first comment on the CD was "Wow, traditional synthesizer just like me old Irish granny used to play."
This CD is overproduced, far too polished and conveys nary an ounce of passion. It is the sort of music you'll hear playing as you peruse the shelves for shiny crystals and sandalwood incense at your local New Age bookstore, or as soothing background noise while you get a colonic or have your aura cleansed. In a possible attempt to convince us of his Celtic identity, Arkenstone poses in a photo on the back of the CD case wearing long flowing hair and a knotwork pendant the size of a Volkswagon emblem; this is about as close to Celtic as you're likely to get with The Celtic Book of Days.
Dont take my word for it, visit the web site!
