| Tempted | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Waterlillies |
| Cover: | Tempted_(Waterlillies_album)_Album_Art.jpeg |
| Alt: | The album cover for Tempted, on which a woman wearing a green dress and sunglasses is throwing her head back |
| Released: | 1994 |
| Genre: | Dance |
| Label: | Kinetic/Sire/Reprise |
| Producer: | Ray Carroll |
| Prev Title: | Envoluptuousity |
| Prev Year: | 1992 |
Tempted is the second, and last, album by the American dance duo Waterlillies.[1] [2] It was released in 1994.[3] The title track was a top 10 hit on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart.[4]
The album was mostly produced by Ray Carroll. "Take My Breath Away" was written and produced by Sandra Jill Alikas.[5] Tempted includes an a cappella cover of the Carpenters' "Close to You".[6]
The Junior Vasquez remix of "Never Get Enough" topped the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart for a week in April 1995.[7] It reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Singles Sales chart.
Trouser Press called the title track "a rousing dance track that garnered a fair share of radio and club play," writing that, "except for a wholly unnecessary a cappella rendition of Bacharach/David’s 'Close to You', the Waterlillies’ sophomore album stretches the boundaries of a limited aesthetic palette with greater returns than the debut."[8] Entertainment Weekly thought that, "on its own, singer-producer Sandra Jill Alikas' voice, a stock-still alto not unlike Enya's, would be just another aural massage, but instrumentalist-producer Ray Carroll’s gently boinging tracks add all sorts of shadings—wanton desire in 'Tempted', all-enveloping warmth in 'I Wanna Be There', sorrow in 'Never Get Enough'." Billboard deemed the title track "a jiggly dance/pop number," writing that "Alikas is an angelic, compelling presence."[9]
The Miami Herald called the album "hypnotic," writing that the musicians "somehow manage to inject heat and heart into mid-tempo dance tunes despite using the tools of the trade—synths and drum machines."[10] The Record determined that "Carroll revels in early-Eighties synth-pop, creating dreamy, if uninvolving, melodies, with drum-machine tracks and the occasional hip-hop rhythm."[11] The New Yorker opined that Tempted "happily evokes both the glory days of the electronic eighties and the recent work of other dance-floor mavens, like Saint Etienne and Opus III, but without their nostalgia."[12]
AllMusic wrote that, "what sounds at first blush like just one more formulaic house-beats-plus-diva dance album turns out, on second listen, to be something a bit more subversive than that."