Remembering Pure Moods

Pitchfork – "Various ArtistsPure Moods, Vol. 1"
7.5 out of 10

"The full ad for the U.S. release of Pure Moods lives on in accurate fidelity on YouTube, but it would be a shame not to recollect it for you here. First, a call bursts from a black screen. A quick time-lapse of a sunrise fades into a husky, lusty voiceover (“Imagine…a world…where time drifts slowly...”), which lays cozily across a shot of an autumn mountaintop. At least a dozen vignettes ensue. A woman spins in a woven dress as a unicorn gallops into translucence. A faraway man walks through a fast-moving river. The unicorn reappears, newlyweds gaze and grope at one another before a soulful kiss, waves crash onto a dusky beach, a swarm of hummingbirds eject from a cloud—each image t-boned into one another in an effort to inspire a feeling of chaotic, seductive fantasy, soothing by way of arousal.

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True to their title, Enigma remained heroically and consumingly atop the charts for the majority of the ’90s. “Return to Innocence”—whose indigenous Taiwanese vocalizations blast at the top of the commercial, responsible for waking thousands of half-asleep American citizens on couches—is a glamorous smoothie of pseudo-erotica, a treatise on nostalgia and self-help. Seemingly custom-made for the proto-Y2K fetish for exploring one’s attitude with slogans across graphic t-shirts, its first four lyrics are just words (“Love...devotion…..feeling….emotion”) both inspiring and completely drained of meaning, at once empty and rich. It enjoyed a No. 1 one position on the charts in over 10 countries."