Icelandic singer-songwriter Emiliana Torrini placed number 45 on the annual Vogue List (British edition). Vogue describes the list as the “definite top 100: the trends, the people, the places and our predictions for the year ahead”.
According to Vogue, Emiliana has had a lot of pleasant surprises: “she first came to prominence in Iceland for a CD she recorded, aged 16, for her father’s birthday. (“It was a huge hit without my even meaning it to be.”) Then she was asked to record the vocals for the Lord of the Rings “Gollum’s Song” (“I tried to play it cool but was so excited”) and penned Kylie’s number -one hit “Slow” (“I wrote it in a hour and went to the pub, thinking they’d never use it.”) “.
Vogue says that her most recent album, Fisherman’s Woman, became a hit this year for its “ethereal vocals, personal lyrics and pretty guitar melodies”.
Emiliana was also featured in the August 29th issue of the US magazine the New Yorker. The three page article describes her rise to fame, deciphers her lyrics and lavishes praise on Emiliana.
In describing the single “Slow” the New Yorker says: “Like Prince’s nineteen-eighties hit “Kiss”, the most stripped-down dance track ever to become a No. 1 single, “Slow” is audaciously reduced, a sliver of music that pierces the listener like a laser….suspended above the skeletal foundation is a melody that unfolds within a single octave and is sung at the volume of a civil phone conversation. Torrini’s lyrics tweak the well-worn conceit of the dance-floor seduction, though not so violently that they lose the necessary frankness”.
The New Yorker had this to say about Emiliana’s latest album “Fisherman’s Woman”:
“On “Fisherman’s Woman,” Torrini applies her minimalist algorithm with admirable ruthlessness to the overpopulate genre of mellifluous, well-meaning acoustic music. The album is as intimate and memorable as “Slow”, though it sounds more like the morning after the dance, when someone tells you her life story, quietly but quickly, inches away from you ear. The songs consist of Torrini’s plangent, childlike voice, and Carey’s incantatory acoustic guitar, occasionally augmented by dashes of piano and subdued drumming.”
