Celtic Woman: Ancient Land (Deluxe) - Album Writeup

Spoilers Below!!!
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The new tracks are fantastic!

The Deluxe version is a digital-only album consisting of 27 tracks and has a running time of about 1 hour 39 minutes.

All the new tracks come at the end of the album.

It includes all 18 songs from the CD (including 2 which were not available on the digital album before):
1. The Enchanted Way
2. Ballroom of Romance

As those of us who have the CD or DVD/Blu-ray know, they are both excellent songs and very fun to listen to. Ballroom of Romance is one of my all-time favorite Celtic Woman ceili songs!

There are 9 new songs that weren't on the CD.

1. Newgrange (tour)
2. Orinoco Flow (tour)
3. Fields of Gold (tour)
4. Bean Pháidín (tour)
5. Over the Rainbow (DVD)
6. Siúil A Rúin (DVD)
7. Amazing Grace (DVD)
8. Danny Boy (DVD)
9. The Parting Glass (DVD)

For those counting, that's 11 additional tracks compared to the regular digital version of the album!


Newgrange

Mairead Carlin sounds amazing! This is the version from the Ancient Land tour with a few tweaks. The Ancient Land arrangement is epic and by far my favorite version of the song. Orla's version from A New Journey was haunting and extremely good. But Mairead's voice is so spectacular that it takes the song to a completely different level!

That said, the version on the Deluxe album wasn't perfect. There were two peculiar mixing choices:

1. There was a low frequency vibration injected into parts of the song. It reminded me a bit of the soundtrack from Inception. I think they were going for some sort of ominous undertone, but I thought it sounded a little weird and even a little distracting.

2. Mairead's voice level was, in my opinion, too low relative to the instrumental backing. Her voice was the highlight of the song during the tour as it should have been. She blew my mind all 4 times I heard her sing this live. EDIT: In the deluxe album version, her voice was close to a reasonable level when she was singing words, but when she went into epic humming mode, it seemed her level was dramatically reduced. In the version on the Deluxe album, even when she was belting out the climax of the song, it almost seemed like her voice played a supporting role. Was that supposed to represent the distant and faded memory of an ancient culture or something? Regardless of the reason, if it was done by choice, I think it was by far the worst decision they made on the album (except for maybe that deep vibration sound I mentioned). EDIT: I think it still could have worked if the magnitude of imbalance wasn't so dramatic. I love the actual song arrangement, but the mixing in this song didn't work for me at all. All the other new songs turned out fantastic. I don't know what happened with this one.

Over the Rainbow

This was the other track in which the vocal levels were slightly underpowered relative to the backing instrumentals. EDIT: This one was far more subtle, but it's almost like at the end of the song, when they were in "epic humming" mode, their voices started getting suppressed, almost as if there was some sort of amplitude gate that kicked in and reduced the volume on their voices once they reached a certain threshold. That said, it was pretty minor in this track and I still loved the way it sounded.

Fields of Gold

Some of the Classic Celtic Woman fans might hate me for saying this, but this is my all-time favorite version of the song. Lisa Kelly and Anabel Sweeney both did a fantastic job. But I thought the arrangement from Songs from the Heart didn't let Lisa do enough with the song. Anabel got to perform the song on Homecoming with a lot of emotion. But with the Ancient Land arrangement, I thought Megan got the most out of just about every note. <3

Orinoco Flow

The version from the Ancient Land tour. I may sound like I'm repeating myself, but this is once again my all-time favorite arrangement of the song. It features an excellent use of percussion, orchestration, and the voices of our lovely leading ladies.

Siúil A Rúin

EDIT: This was the arrangement from the DVD and tour and it was really fun to listen to! I loved the pleasant and enchanting combination of Eabha's voice, Tara's harp, and Eabha's tin whistle.

Amazing Grace, Danny Boy, and The Parting Glass are essentially the same arrangements we've heard on tour over the past few years. Very, very good arrangements! All three recordings are excellent!



Bean Pháidín

This arrangement is soooo much fun to listen to! There are a lot of sub-tunes that surface during the song and they're all amazing! Not just my favorite ever version of the song, it's one of my all-time favorite Celtic Woman songs! While I thought the Destiny version was really good, this one is totally different and it's better than I could have ever imagined.

Overall

All the new tracks are great, although I think different mixing decisions on Newgrange and Over the Rainbow could have made them even better. In spite of some of the tracks not being perfect, the new tracks were so good overall that they've broken the first place deadlock in my head between Ancient Land and A New Journey.

The Ancient Land deluxe album is now alone at the top as my favorite album ever!!!



P.S. I'm adding the new tracks to the poll!

I'll listen tonight!

What are some of your favorite Lisa Lambe pictures?

Here's one of my favorites. She looks like she's gazing straight into someone's soul.

Chloë already surpassed her target to go ahead with both album projects AND her threshold for doing music videos to promote the albums.

We're almost a third of the way to $100k. Still a long way to go, but we can do it, Chlovërs!

Chloë announced a huge fundraising campaign tonight along with 2 new albums and possibly a TV special!

There is a LOT of information on her campaign site, so if you want all the details, check it out.

Chloë has decided to release two independent albums, without the backing of a powerful marketing machine. That means she has total control over what and when she releases. She can make the music she wants to make and the music that we want to hear. While that gives her unprecedented freedom, it also means she really needs our help to fund her projects.

Her first two albums (she's calling them projects, but I assume they will become albums, possibly of different titles) are:

Reimagine

Will feature the classic songs you know me for plus ones you may have heard me sing on stage but I never have recorded.   All reimagined and told my way.

Written on my Heart

If you have been following my journey you will already know that songwriting has become a huge part of my life.  I have been privileged to work with some amazing writers from around the world. Each is helping me tell my story all while creating music that I hope will make you feel as good as I do when I sing it.  "Written on my Heart" is a collection of these songs.

If we somehow manage to get her to $100K, she's doing a TV special for us.

She's offering a lot of other levels funding rewards as incentives (as if we needed more reasons to support her). Some of the rewards are insanely amazing. Details are on her campaign site!

I found something interesting while searching for tour dates...

Apparently there's a new Mairead Nesbitt show coming called Celtic Spells.

It was mentioned on per profile on Ed Keane Associates Artist Management and Booking:

https://edkeane.com/roster/mairead-nesbitt-celtic-spells/

A new production by one of the Founder's of Celtic Women, Nesbitt returns to the stage of storytelling, spellbinding traditions, with Celtic Spells.

Star-crossed lovers are forbidden by their religions from being together - they must leave their homes and families, cross the ocean to build a life, a family...and cross time in the lives they create...

I haven't been able to find any corroborating evidence so far, so take it with a grain of salt for now, but it sounds interesting.

I think I might need to reserve a couple more vacation days for this.

Suggestions added!