Tempted (Waterlillies album)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[9]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[10]
Entertainment Weekly	A−[11]
Knoxville News Sentinel	[12]

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."^[1] 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'."^[11] Billboard deemed the title track "a jiggly dance/pop number," writing that "Alikas is an angelic, compelling presence."^[13]

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."^[14] 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."^[15] 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."^[16]

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."^[9]