Fisherman's Woman | Emiliana Torrini

Fisherman's Woman | Emiliana Torrini | Simply stunning album to warm your heart

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Fisherman's Woman

	Fisherman's Woman Emiliana Torrini Rough Trade Us, 2005 average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"Home alone and happy / Nothing brings me down" So opens Emiliana Torrini?s second album, a soft-yet-searing collection of twelve intimate and atmospheric songs that will whisper their way into your bloodstream. Back in 1999, when the singer released the critically acclaimed Love In The Time Of Science, Emiliana came out with a gorgeous, electronic trippoppin? vision of endless summer and moonlit nights out. Following her departure from One Little Indian, there?s a new introspection, closer to Nick Drake or Jolie Holland than Portishead or Goldfrapp. The 27-year-old singer and writer has nonetheless been busy since Love In The Time Of Science. She moved to Brighton, joined the cast of Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers to perform the enchanting ?Gollum Song? wrote and toured with Thievery Corporation, and wrote a Number One Hit for Kylie Minogue in the shape of huge-selling pop smash "Slow."

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Sutíl melancolía

Con un disco como este sobran las palabras. Es bellísimo, es de una sonoridad tan íntima y está lleno de una melancolía tan sutíl... Su belleza radica en la sencillez de la instrumentación y en la "tristeza" de la voz de Emiliana.

Simply stunning album to warm your heart

This was one of those albums that I heard one song off while driving late at night and had to dig around for a pen while driving to write down her name so I could go and buy the album the next day.

It is a quiet and beautiful album that is really touching, great to listen to loud with the lights turned down low. Check out the background sound at the start of the album which is the sound of a boat creaking against a dock. It has a real live sound to it as if you are just sitting in the room with her, a guitarist and an accordion player.

It reminds me a lot of Nick Drake's Pink Moon but without the depressing angle to it.

I find it to be a far superior album to her earlier Love In The Time Of Science as I think the earlier album suffers from trying to fill out her sound with a bit electronica backing with crappy beats which tends to make her sound like so many B-Grade emo-girl-pop types like Dido, it comes off sounding like a bad version of Hooverphonic The Magnificent Tree. It also sounds like her endearing quirky voice was flattened out to sound like a generic female American vocalist.

So if you want a really relaxing, stripped back, acoustic, honest, revealing, haunting, quirky album and bares many a re-listen this is it, it goes up there next to Nick Drake's Pink Moon.Pink Moon

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Nothing brings me down

Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini captured the audience's ears with the exquisite "Gollum's Song" in the second "Lord of the Rings" movie, then with her U.S. debut "Love in the Time of Science." Now her long-awaited fourth album, "Fisherman's Woman" has come -- and it was worth the wait.

In "Love in the Time of Science," the sound was exotic trip-hop. This time around, Torrini opts for a more organic sound. For instance, the downtempo "Lifesaver" sounds like it was recorded in a boat -- there are wooden creaks just under Torrini's gentle acoustic guitar and wistful vocals, as if she were sitting in the middle of a lake when she recorded it.

That same feeling sticks to the other songs on the album. Torrini seems to be thinking about loss, but her songs are never really quite tragic: the opener "Nothing Brings Me Down" is a good example, with its stripped-down guitar-and-piano sound, followed by the exquisite "Sunny Road," and ending with the entrancingly dark "Serenade."

It's a pretty drastic thing to change your sound after a successful first album. But Torrini not only does it, she succeeds again. The same sense of eerie romance that was in "Love in the Time of Science" is in "Fisherman's Woman" as well, but it's more intimate. And sad. As beautiful as Torrini's trip-hop is, her acoustic ballads are just as lovely.

Don't expect programming or blips. No trip-hop. "Fisherman's woman" is all about a more organic sound, mainly using a quiet acoustic guitar for the instrumentation. A few other things pop up -- a few sound samples, mellow piano -- but guitar is the heart and soul of the music. It's not too hard to imagine Torrini and her guitar sitting by a riverside, playing to passers-by.

And Torrini's voice doesn't lose any of its beauty because of the lack of production; her quirky, childlike, slightly creaky voice is as endearing as ever, but here it's unencumbered by electronics. "And it's funny how your cause/makes no sense at all," she sings in "Lifesaver." For someone so sad, she sounds almost playful.

With her last album, Emiliana Torrini showed that she was a pop singer to watch. In the intimate "Fisherman's Woman," she embraces a whole other kind -- gentle, dreamlike folkpop.

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