Recording of the Week, Elina Duni & Rob Luft - Lost Ships

The fruitful partnership between Albanian-Swiss singer/song-writer Elina Duni and British guitarist Rob Luft was initiated when they met at a music workshop in Lausanne in 2017, and shortly after Luft was helping add textures to Duni’s songs for live performance. Several years on the relationship has become more collaborative, with Lost Ships, the duo’s first official release together, being a sequence of meditations on ‘love and exile’ that positions Luft’s guitar as something of a foil to Duni’s haunting, plaintive vocals. Bearing in mind how versatile a musician Duni is, having played all of the instruments on her deeply melancholic 2018 album Partir herself, it’s a sign of her trust for Luft's instincts that she focuses purely on her voice for this project. As a result Lost Ships inhabits a more open, less insular sound world, and includes thoughtful support from Fred Thomas on piano and percussion, and Swiss flugelhornist Matthieu Michel.

Duni’s voice sits in a comfortable mid-range, and although she normally sings with a sort of hushed intensity, it’s clear there is plenty of latent power behind every note. At times on tracks like the old favourite ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’ she reminded me of Jeff Buckley in the way her voice seems to be wavering on the verge breaking and hitting higher notes. She sings in four languages on Lost Ships - Albanian, English, French, Italian - sounding convincing in all of them, and maintaining an emotional consistency that’s carried throughout the record. The choice of songs is catholic, offering up Frank Sinatra and Charles Aznavour alongside folks songs like ‘The Wayfaring Stranger’ or ‘N’at Zaman’ from Duni’s homeland. These are interspersed with impressive originals the duo have written themselves, and the mix works well. Despite the dark themes underlying the album, the migration crisis being particularly prominent (and explicitly implied in the ‘Lost Ship’ of the title), the abiding tone of the album is one of loss and longing rather than anger and resentment. A sense of ennui does stalk the lyrics of many of these songs, whether it be the oppressive roar of the sea in ‘Brighton’, the quiet desperation of ‘Lux’, or the wistful gazing back at a youth slipped by in Aznavour’s ‘Hier Encore’. Duni’s delivery of these tone poems is so nuanced and varied, and accompanied by music that is often contrastingly upbeat, that we never sense she is wallowing in self-pity.

The arrangements have all been deeply considered, wisely maintaining focus on the intimate pairing of voice and guitar, which at times feel delicately cross-stitched together, and makes the moments when Thomas and Michel come to the forefront all the more powerful. It feels as if Luft has individually handcrafted a new guitar sound or production technique for each track, which helps things avoid hitting any lulls or getting overly repetitive. On ‘Numb’ his initial fingerpicking gradually morphs into an eastern-sounding sequence on backwards guitar section, and I loved how the song shifts from dejection towards transcendence around the halfway mark. Fred Thomas’s percussive contributions are tastefully low-key throughout, often making the most of tiny detail - for example, the child-like wooden block and snare pattern found in the same track. Matthieu Michel’s trumpet is used sparingly, his crystalline lines always feeling organic and emerging at just the right moment, as in Brighton.

This is a refined yet emotional album that could appeal to a broad audience, taking in Latin, chansons, jazz and folk. The songs that Duni and Luft have written themselves are so strong I could imagine a collection focussed solely on their originals being just as artistically successful someday.