Daiana Feuer

Emiliana Torrini may come gift-wrapped and gleaming, replete with bow and curly-q smile. But beneath the overall cuteness of her manner, there’s a girl who likes to party. She even admitted it to the audience, referring to a period in her life when she first moved from her small island (Iceland) to England and raged all the time, party all night, party all the day, rendering that life passage as a blurred memory trapped in her songs. But she is so darn “cute,” probably the audience can’t imagine her tossing beers and party drugs down the hatch (not sure if it’s true, this is speculation). She did name her album Me And Armini after a song that she doesn’t remember writing. I don’t think the jump is too difficult to entertain, especially after she relates her admiration for some hippies and a dog that came to her show one time and were “on some great acid.” She also mentioned getting a bottle thrown at her head on another occasion (she told us a lot of things). I think this girl gets down. Somehow, experience translates through her into gentle, mostly relaxed, clean, PG-13, romantics. And this is awesome: Experience does not dictate expression in the ultimate sense. She may hit da club, but the creative output doesn’t take the Lady Gaga form (even though Torrini pens a raunchy pop song at times, see “Slow” with Kylie Minogue). Instead, life brings a warm-hearted confessional tune such as “Jungle Drum” out of Torrini—which she delivers, bobbing her head side to side and stretching out her fists like a child waking from a restful nap.

And she wrote “Gollum’s Song.”

—Daiana Feuer