Fisherman's Woman

If there is only one album you buy this year, please please let it be this. Emiliana returns with the most captivating folk album of recent times, combining her delicate but powerful vocals with impossibly good melodies, perfect musical arrangements and a set of songs that place her as surely one of the best artists around.

In all honesty there is not a bad song on this album, and tracks such as "Sunnyroad", the sweet and enchanting first single, "Today Has Been OK" and the outstanding "At Least It Was" display Emiliana's talents. Title track "Fisherman's Woman" takes the listener far away from the city and time of science of her debut, and into a simple, more homely world where melancholy and sweetness are balances effortlessly to create an album that is both warming and heartbreaking.

At recent gigs she performed most of these songs and on stage in an intimate setting, the power of the music is completely engulfing, and it is with this new sound that Emiliana seems completely at home. You get the feeling that she has put everything into this album, and when you're listening to the songs that you really get to know her inside out. What is most striking about this album is its lack of pretence. It sounds so completely natural, free from the self-consciousness and artifice that colours so many other artists. A beautifully honest and human album, and as a nice surprise, even more spellbinding than her debut album.

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. No trip-hop. Torrini opts for a more organic sound this time around, mainly using guitar for the instrumentation. A few other things pop up -- sound samples, piano -- but guitar is the heart and soul of the music. And Torrini's voice doesn't lose any of its beauty because of the lack of production. "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 proves that her fourth effort was worth the wait.