What: The new album from the Icelandic chanteuse
Where: Currently available in the UK only
How Much: £8.50 at Amazon UK
You know what I hate? Have you ever bought a great CD from an artist, only to never hear from them again? I suppose in a way it’s better than really bad follow-up albums. After all, was there any need for A Flock of Seagulls’ 1995 stinker The Light At The End Of The World or The Fixx’s unheard-by-anyone 1991 album Ink? At least when an artist disappears you don’t have some godawful claptrap ruining your memory of the band. But still, a collapse into nothingness is sad. There are a slew of abandoned websites out there that promise “a new album coming out soon!” yet haven’t been updated since 1999. I thought that one artist in particular was going to fall into this trap, but thankfully she hasn’t.
I don’t remember the exact moment I first heard Emiliana Torrini. I do know that it was while working for Pathfire, where one of my co-workers – good ol’ Joe Klingler – had a massive music-sharing file server set up. It’s kind of funny – he was told to spend the rest of his department’s budget for the year, so he went out and bought a massive server with a RAID-10 disk configuration and gigabit Ethernet in it and… Well, it’s not that important, really. It suffices to say that he commandeered a massive amount of company hardware that held well over 200GB for music on it at the time. So anyway, one day he turned me on to this mellow Icelandic chick whose voice sounded a lot like Bjork but who’s smooth, mostly downtempo electronic music was much more soothing and consistent than her fellow countrywoman. I mean, I’ve got nothing against Bjork, but the girl can sometimes just be all over the damn place. And while I can appreciate her wanting to develop a new sound for each album… well, sometimes it’s just a bit too much. Emiliana Torrini has a much more… controlled sound. When you listen to her, you can rest assured that she’s not going to go off on some loud, jazzy “It’s Oh So Quiet” rant just when you’re falling asleep. No, Emiliana is far more smooth and atmospheric, some would say in the Massive Attack vein. I think that that comparison is a bit off, but there *is* certainly some truth to it. While Emiliana is mostly softer electronica, that doesn’t mean that all of her songs have less of a beat than most Zamphir tunes. No, no… far from it. The girl can rock when she wants to!
Joe burned me a copy of her first album – Love in the Time of Science, which was produced by Roland Orzibal (of Tears for Fears), who also played guitar and keyboards and even sang some of the backing vocals on the disc! I was hooked from the very first listen, which is rare for me. I’m one of those guys that almost always has to listen to a CD two or three times before I really get into it. But I didn’t have to with Love in the Time of Science – from the opening chords of the first track (“To Be Free”) the the final fade-out of the last track (“Sea People”), I was smitten, bitten, hooked and cooked. This album is freakin’ perfect – much like Madonna’s Ray of Light, every sound of every song on the album is perfectly in place. It’s just one of the most beautifully engineered albums I’ve ever heard, bar none. If just one song had one extra sound effect or stray note the album wouldn’t be perfect… but I can assure you that it is. Like “This Mortal Coil perfect”. And how about Emiliana’s lyrics? Well, the whole theme of Love in the Time of Science (as the title suggests) explores a world where science and technology have not only conquered religion, the supernatural and the superstition, but love as well. It’s dark and scary, but sometimes the words just take your breath away. Check out the lyrics to track 3 (“Baby Blue”):
Boxing shadows in my sleep
It’s the company I keep
The perfect exercise
As I grow older
I can’t believe what God has done
He took the heat out of the sun
And now it seems the world
Is growing colder
Between the pleasure and the pain
Wishing your life away
No more sinister than sane
Breathing your life away
Between the flicker and the flame
No one can explain
Baby blue is born again
But then she disappeared. Sort of. Love in the Time of Science came out in 1999, yet Emiliana spent several years doing “bit parts” like appearing on Paul Oakenfold’s 2002 Bunkka album. For a while it seemed as if she’d never release a new album. But one afternoon a couple of months ago I somehow stumbled upon her website and found out that she had a new album coming out in late January 2005 called Fisherman’s Woman. Awesome! But then I read more about it… about how she was ditching her electronic sound to go more “folksy”. Bad memories of Nina Persson of The Cardigans filled my head; Nina dyed her lovely blonde hair black and moved to Texas a few years back (and took The Cardigans down with her). Ya know, people say that white folks shouldn’t rap… how about extending the ban to European pop stars doing country or folksy stuff? I mean, I love New Order as much as anyone, but if I ever hear Bernard Sumner try to sing “Ring of Fire” I’m putting a bullet in his head. Seriously. Given how much I adore Love in the Time of Science I just had to order the new disc… but that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be nervous about it.
The disc arrived from the UK in a near-record four business days; I’ve never quite understood why Amazon UK can get something to me before Amazon US can. But that’s another rant for another day. I opened the package only to find out that I had been sent a “limited first edition” of the disc… and I’m still trying to find out what’s so “special” about it. It’s a typical crappy digipack (cardboard case with a plastic disc holder) along with a craptaucular cardboard cover. What’s crappy about this is that the closed end of the outer cover folds over, right? Meaning that you could open the closed end to store the cover flat. But of course, this means that the little flap that you pull out to make the cover flat also takes up a bit of space at the end. So when you try to put the CD back in the case, the $@!(*# flap is in the way. If you try to jam it in, the other side of the cover pops open. If you try opening the closed end, inserting the CD and closing the flap over it.. well, the cardboard is so damn cheap that it bends. Bastards! You’d think that in 20+ years of CD manufacturing little niggling things like this would be fixed by now… But you’d be wrong. What the hell is wrong with a friggin’ plastic jewel case? Anyhoo, the disc also includes a booklet with printed lyrics inside. A nice touch, I guess. But it’s nothing fancy and Emiliana’s clear pronunciation (on an acoustic album, no less) makes it sort of pointless. Again I ask: what makes this a “limited first edition”? Who knows, who cares. At least it didn’t cost anything extra.
Anyway, I put the disc in my DVD burner and ripped it to WAV files, which were then converted to MP3 and FLAC files. ‘Cos I’m like that, OK. I’m one of those jerks that won’t let his CDs or DVDs leave the house, nor do I usually every play them again after ripping then. Sue me. SO – after this was done, I nervously loaded the FLAC files into WinAMP and pressed play… and it was good… good.. Yeah – it’s pretty good! The album isn’t so much “folksy” as it is “acoustic”. Honestly, when I read that Emiliana was going that route, I was imagining some God-awful European take on a Joan Baez lovefest. Blech! But fear not faithful readers – it ain’t like that. The first track – “Nothing Brings Me Down” – is lyrically similar to the work Torrini did on Love, but the music – mostly a single acoustic guitar and some light piano – sounds… I dunno… almost like an acoustic rendition of something off of the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand album. It’s soft and quiet, yet velvety and is as economic as anything on Love. But then there’s the next tune – and upcoming first single from the album – “SunnyRoad”:
Brought you this
I hope you got it safe
It’s been so long
I don’t know what to say
I’ve traveled ’round
Through deserts on my horse
Put jokes aside
I wanna come back home
You know at night
I said I had to go
You said you’d meet me
On the sunny road
It’s time, meet me on the sunny road
it’s time, meet me on the sunny road
I never married
Never had those kids
I loved too many
Now heaven’s closed its gates.
I know I’m bad
To jump on you like this
Some things don’t change
My middle name’s still ‘Risk’
I know that night
So long long time ago
Will you still meet me
On the sunny road
It’s time, meet me on the sunny road
It’s time, meet me on the sunny road
Well, this is it
I’m running out of space
Here is my address
And number just in case.
This time as one
We’ll find which way to go
Now come and meet me
On the sunny road
Wow – just… wow! This is a freakin’ sweet song! Unlike “Nothing Brings Me Down”, this tune has some light percussion going on in the background. And after a few listenings to this tune, I realized what was going on here: Torrini has “re-engineered” the same sound she developed for Love in the Time of Science but in acoustic form. This isn’t electronic music that’s been hacked into acoustic form – like Depeche Mode on MTV’s Unplugged. It’s not that at all. It’s as if Torrini sat down with a guitar and a piano and cranked out a few tunes, then tried to figure out how to best translate her electronic sound into acoustic form. She put a lot of thought into it – you can tell.
This isn’t to say that the album is solely acoustic instruments. Track 4 (“Lifesaver”) starts off with sounds of the surf and the rickety creaking of a boat. The creaking continues throughout the song, as more and more instruments join in. You hear the occasional odd sound – like the groaning of ropes being stretched – but it all fits. The next tune (“Honeymoon Child”) is “acoustic” in the sense that there’s just a guitar and her voice, but the guitar is flanged-out Violet Indiana style.
And so it goes on. This is a wonderful album, and it’s interesting in that I enjoy listening to it all the way through – something that I simply cannot do with most of the “quiet” female artists out there. Aimee Mann… Natalie Merchant… Nina Persson solo… Sure, they all have some great tunes. But most of their albums are two great songs surrounded by slow, quiet filler material. More than once I’ve almost fallen asleep at my desk listening to that or decided to switch to something a bit more upbeat. This is not the case here. I likes it! But even though I like the new album, I really wish she would have continued with music along the lines of Love in the Time of Science. If you haven’t heard it, I can’t explain it… Suffice it to say that is one of my favorite albums ever.
UPDATE: Thanks to a thread in the Lounge at the Ars Technica forums I found out that Emiliana was going to be on the world-renowned radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic on Santa Monica, California’s KCRW radio today (02/16/2005). During the show, Emiliana mentioned that sometime after Love in the Time of Science she “lost the most important person in the world” to her and that she didn’t really remember much of what happened for the year and a half following this. She did not elaborate. She did clarify some other things I knew about her career but did not mention when I first wrote this review because I was unsure of the time frame… Now I can tell you that that – towards the end of her “sad time” – she got a call from the guys in Thievery Corporation and worked on a few songs with them. Shortly after this she was contacted to do “Gollum’s Song” for the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. She then wrote and\or produced several songs for Kylie Minogue, including her UK smash hit “Slow” before starting work on Fisherman’s Woman. So it seems that she got back into music at the behest of others. Good for us!
MY RATING: B+