Heys, I’m just trying to catch up here… at work, getting some sort of life back, with this little site, and with my reading. Caught this little bit of Feist love in the New York Times. Keren Ann (arg..) and new darlings Nouvelle Vague are mentioned of course, but the piece does also highlight Emiliana Torrini, whose second album, Fisherman’s Woman saw Stateside release last week, I believe.
I heard Emiliana Torrini’s first album a few years ago, and despite her Icelandic lineage (props to my heritage!), it didn’t quite gel with me at the time, as I found it a bit Bjork-derivative and I was getting over the whole trip-hop vibe.
However, I did fork over for Fisherman’s Woman a few months ago based solely on a Guardian review (must stop being so compulsive!). In the beginning, again, I found it a bit derivative, but this time in a whole new direction. Fisherman’s Woman at first reminded me more than a bit of a very spared down This Mortal Coil/4AD production, especially with the sort of Lady sings the Nick Drake kind of vibe on several of the songs. Also, the lyrics are a bit weak. However, Fisherman’s Woman grew on me slowly but absolutely surely and I have a new respect for Torrini’s songwriting and singing.
I was kind of saving my Fisherman’s Woman comments for a tandem entry on Emiliana Torrini and newcomer Tara Angell, whose debut, Come Down, over several listens I have also quite warmed to, and whose work is also quite distinctively intimate, but in the interim, go out and add Fisherman’s Woman to your collection. By no means the party album of the year of course but is a lovely complement to those quieter, more introspective moments, and it will catch you off guard.
Torrini, for all her earthiness, oddly enough, wrote Kylie’s recent hit single, “Slow.”
NYT article after the jump.
April 21, 2005
April 21, 2005
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; From Dreary to Enchanting, the Sounds of Evolving European Singers
By KELEFA SANNEH
Let's not pretend it is some sort of trend. Let's just acknowledge that through some strange coincidence, this seems to be the season of the European chanteuse. A handful of them are washing up (rather elegantly) on American shores, bringing their breathy albums with them.
In February, Nettwerk released an American version of ''Bye Bye Beauté,'' the charming new CD from the French singer Coralie Clément. Last month, Blue Note released ''Nolita,'' the graceful but rather dull new album from the French-Israeli singer Keren Ann. And anyone eager for something a bit more high concept and a lot more obnoxious (as is often the case, you don't get one without the other) will be pleased to know that on May 3, Luaka Bop plans to issue an American version of Nouvelle Vague's self-titled debut album. The disc, masterminded by a pair of French producers, consists of muted bossa nova versions of punk and new-wave standards.
Yet the two most exciting chanteuses of the moment aren't really chanteuses at all. One is an expatriate Canadian (settled, for the moment, in Paris England
The newly minted Parisian is Leslie Feist, who records as Feist, and who has appeared on record with the Canadian indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene and with the exuberantly vulgar female Canadian rapper Peaches. Along the way, she formed a partnership with Chilly Gonzales, the Paris-based Canadian producer whose résumé includes ''Rendez-vous,'' the most recent Jane Birkin album.
French listeners first heard the excellent new Feist album, ''Let It Die,'' in March 2004, and the Canadians got it two months later. A few weeks ago, Canadians showed their appreciation by giving Ms. Feist a pair of Juno Awards, for best new artist and best alternative album. (Watch her acceptance speech, plus a performance that recovers from a mid-song disaster, at listentofeist.com.) On Tuesday, thanks to a new Interscope imprint called Cherry Tree, American listeners finally will get a ''Let It Die'' to call their own.
On the album, Ms. Feist tosses off one enthralling song after another, casually revealing her little surprises as if each one were no big deal. ''Mushaboom'' starts with some strummed guitar and a couplet that undoes itself: ''Helping the kids out of their coats/But wait, the babies haven't been born.'' Almost before you notice them, horns and keyboards creep into the mix, and so, slyly, does the title -- the nonsense word becomes a sotto voce rhythm instrument.
The album's title track is a glowing, vibraphone-enhanced un-love song: ''The saddest part of a broken heart/Isn't the ending so much as the start.'' But just as the album reaches a melancholy peak with ''Lonely, Lonely,'' the singer switches directions.
The album's second half consists of covers: she raids the repertory of Ron Sexsmith, Texas Gladden, even the Bee Gees, whose ''Inside Out'' has never sounded more enticing. Fittingly enough, the album ends with a pair of songs borrowed from an album by another North American singer who spent time in Paris
As it happens, the Italo-Icelandic Londoner is also a Blossom Dearie fan. Her name is Emiliana Torrini, and last December she was the co-host of an hourlong Blossom Dearie tribute on BBC Radio 3.
Like Ms. Feist, Ms. Torrini made a quiet solo album only after trying just about everything else. In 1999, she released a glimmering, electronics-enhanced album called ''Love in the Time of Science,'' and since then she has appeared on the soundtrack to ''The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'' (singing ''Gollum's Song''), co-written a hit for Kylie Minogue (the hypnotic ''Slow'') and toured with the rather unpleasant lounge-fusion act Thievery Corporation.
Now comes ''Fisherman's Woman'' (Rough Trade), also due out this Tuesday. It has fewer electronic beats and pieces than the 1999 one, but just as many intoxicating songs -- more, in fact. Ms. Torrini's voice is warm and whispery and appealingly unpredictable: she knows when to flatten the melody with a half-spoken phrase and when to carry it up and away.
In ''Heartstopper,'' our despondent heroine tells a sad story and drinks ''the blackest coffee you will ever see.'' Yet the acoustic guitar and rippling beat suggest something else: restrained but unkillable optimism -- expressed, here as elsewhere, in an elegant, breathy voice.
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