So where's The Rivers Of Belief? Where's The Eyes of Truth?

Great melodies, great performances, great instrumentation/SFX. Five stars for the amount of endorphins released at each listen.

With their first release, Enigma showed that you can create a commercially successful record out of sampled beats, French whispers and chanting, Latin monks. Various other artists quickly caught on to the idea and jumped on to the world-electronic-Newage-chillout bandwagon, releasing singles with various degrees of success. But Enigma returned with their second studio album `The Cross of Changes' to show them how it's really done.
The album begins with `The Second Chapter', reintroducing the familiar horns from the first album's `Voice of Enigma', but largely abandoning that track's cringing pretentiousness with more grounded lyrics and ominous, rolling synths that flow into the epic `Eyes of Truth'. This 9-minute instrumental showcases fantastically how Michael Cretu extends his palette of instruments to those of...well, pretty much everywhere in the world. Yes, the pan pipes come back, but we also have reed instruments and a vast array of percussion that add such depth and texture to the songs that you'll hear something new with each listen. You do get the occasional choir of monks cropping up, but it's Asian chants here that take centre stage. And nowhere on this album are they mixed as perfectly as they are on `Return to Innocence': a truly moving and uplifting track about abandoning pretence and believing in yourself.
The glory of this track is strangely juxtaposed to one of Enigma's darkest tracks, `I Love You...I'll Kill You', another 9-minute extravaganza with questionable lyrics but an awesome guitar solo provided by Enigma co-producer, Jens Gad. The darkness continues with the rhythmic, politically charged `Silent Warrior' with its rant on colonisation and Christian hypocrisy before we're given a breather with the short, sweet and tender `Dream of the Dolphin' which rounds off the brilliant first two-thirds of the album.
The tracks which follow - `Age of Loneliness' (a slightly tweaked `Carly's Song', which Enigma contributed towards the film `Sliver') and `Out from the Deep' - are by no means bad, they're just weaker than those mentioned so far. The album ends far from disappointingly, though, as we're given a brilliant send-off by the short and stirring title song.
The consistency of this album doesn't quite match that of MCMXC a.D. as its mood (from joyous, to depressed, to angry) does tend to change quite abruptly which makes it quite hard to see what Cretu is trying to say. His raspy, sandpaper-ish vocals also feature more in this record and although they work on the `Silent Warrior', you can't help thinking that `Out from the Deep' might sound better with someone else on vocal duties.
Still, this album does better its predecessor in one respect: even though all the tracks flow into each other, each one is strong enough to stand on their own. And with all the hypnotic sounds that trickle from the speakers, this album is definitely a worthy successor to MCMXC a.D.