Really not that great as its predecessor

Secret Garden was for me one of the rediscoveries of 2004. All of their albums to date would include my "Desert Iceland" collection.
There was great expectation on this new CD, and since it was in Germany as long as I have it ordered from Amazon USA.
The trend I confirm the comments of the previous candidates: Nice to beautiful, but the spark of enthusiasm is blocked by something.
Rolf and Fionnula have some of the pieces on this new CD with a little too much ambition, if I may say so, written and designed and overloaded with it. This is especially true for "Half the World Away", where the vocal is then taken over almost operatic ripe of a "trained" male voice. - Not my case. Or perhaps a little artificially acting instruments such as Bach trumpet.
Secret Garden for me are at their best when they are based on the folk and there is then on this CD some real masterpieces: "Sleep Song" (a dream), "The Reel" (exciting - I have the world premiere of this piece in Sydney witnessed), "Lotus" (dreamy exotic with the guest appearance of a Chinese erhu player), "Daughters of Erin" (beautiful "Irish").
The hymns sung are certainly pathetic ("Always there" & "Raise your voices"), but already one knows from the previous CDs and probably belongs to the temperament of thoughtful Norwegian Rolf Lovland as composers. I personally like these pieces really.
Some wrote that 3 pieces are more on the Norwegian version. True, I have seen in Oslo, but unfortunately the CD there is also twice as expensive as here.
By the way, I was recently in Shanghai and since I got this CD a beautiful Collectors Box with a separate DVD about the making of the album as well as the Chinese version of "Always there" - and all at a regular price (no predatory pressure) of 6 80 EUR !!!!!!
But back to the contents of this CD.
The booklet for the CD is as always well decorated and informative. You can learn everything about the background of the pieces and the respective musicians. May indeed be somewhat conservative, but I would hope that I would have such booklets to more CDs of other artists.
My résumé: Certainly one of the weaker CDs of Secret Garden, but still worth buying and worlds better than many other (highly praised) "scrap" of other artists