Helena Mulkerns in "Rolling Stone" called the album "a rich mood piece of broad proportions" and "a glorious aural mosaic". The title track "sails the listener gently into an ebb-and-flow movement that permeates the album" that contains multi-vocals she described as "distinctive" and "striking". She thought Roma's lyrics were "unornamented but compelling", and that its mutli-lingual touches "enrich" the listening experience without becoming too dominating. Kristine McKenna, in the "Los Angeles Times", wrote a critical review, describing it as "a portentous pastiche that's drawn comparisons to ecclesiastical choir and Gregorian chant, but in fact sounds like nothing more than unusually windy New Age music" that "makes for bland, bloodless music ideal for elevators; this is a record about sound rather than lyrics, melody, or any of the other things that invest music with emotion and ideas." In "The Village Voice", Robert Christgau labelled the album a "must to avoid" and said Enya exploits popular music's "old reliable women-are-angels scam" while "humanizing technology, perpetrating banal verse in three languages (I'm guessing about the Gaelic after reading the English and figuring out the Latin), and mentioning Africa, the Orinoco, and other deep dark faraway places".