The Icelandic singer is seeing off a stalking fan to the airport with police escort on the title track of her new album. All set to some nice, upbeat pop reggae. Torrini has more surprises in store for you.

There are touches of raucous 1950s Rockabilly on ‘Ha Ha’ and ‘Jungle Drum’. There’s the odd but funky ‘Heard It All Before’. There’s the dark ‘Gun’, all drenched in tremolo and reverb. And there’s a perfect pop song in shape of ‘Big Jumps’ that should make the playlists of more adventorous radio stations.

It’s new territory for Torrini, a quiet singer-songwriter who established herself as a musican’s musician with her two previous albums. She’s co-penned a song for Kylie Minogue (’Slow’), contributed to the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack and has a solo career as a folky pop singer who’s apparently huge in her native Iceland.

‘Me And Armini’ marks a change in Torrini’s approach to songwriting. Rather than working on songs for months, looking for perfection, it took Torrini two and a half weeks to write the entire album. “It took me a long time to realise that songs want to be born,” says Torrini on her website. “It’s like a roomful of ballons and you’re pulling one down by its string.”

Torrini has experimented with Rock and Dance influenced sounds before, but with the exception of ‘Unemployed In Summertime’ the results were pretty heavy handed and somewhat overly fussy.

There’s a much lighter touch at work on ‘Me And Armini’ and a definite bounce to most of the material. Whether that’s the songwriting or the choice of instrumentation is hard to say. Half the tracks here still feature Torrini accompanied by acoustic guitar. But it’s the other half, the half that unashamedly plays with pop and 1950s rock that sounds the freshest.

We say:

Listen to Emiliana Torrini

Readers from the UK and Ireland, Click Here to download ‘Armini And Me’ from iTunes UK.