o often in music, it’s not the ‘what’—it’s the ‘how.’ Sometimes, it’s in the way a line that may look dull on paper sounds in delivery, or how a song that doesn’t strike you as much initially, manages to sneaks its way into your head and refuses to get out. That’s the how—the x-factor that’s difficult to pinpoint and even harder to try and sell.

After a few listens of Emiliana Torrini’s Fisherwoman’s Woman you’d be forgiven if this x-factor hadn’t make itself known to you. Immediately, the record sounds, at best, like agreeable-enough but ultimately nondescript background music, and, at worst, like a hopelessly twee collection of New Age snoozers. I was about to write Torrini off, but then a funny thing happened: I was at work, about a week since I’d last listened to Fisherman’s Woman, when I began to notice that tracks I would’ve never described as “catchy” had somehow etched their way into brain, and, just as surprisingly, I suddenly looked very forward to putting the album on as soon as I got back home.

Perhaps, I just wasn’t in the right mood to “get” Torrini during those first few listens. Or maybe her music is the sort of thing that has to sink in over some period of time, and then, when you least expect it, just clicks. Whatever the case, Fisherman’s Woman did register upon my next listen, and has endeared itself more with further spins.

As for now, it’s a decided album-album that I don’t especially enjoy listening to as a whole. There are moments that leave me breathless, and others that still prompt me to hit the skip button. The album’s opener, “Nothing Brings Me Down,” is a barely-there snippet of ethereal folk that induces nothing so much as a big yawn. The next three (“Sunny Road,” “Snow,” “Lifesaver”) still find Torrini merely treading water. Woman’s fifth track, “Honeymoon Child” is where my ears start to prick up a little. Well, to be more specific, it’s the song’s chorus, and to be absolutely precise, Torrini’s delivery of the line “with the vines climb trees towards the light.” While the lyric itself means nothing to me per se, Torrini’s delivery of it gives me chills. That has to count for something, right?

The next track, “Today Has Been OK,” represents the record’s first brave lyrical step beyond the safety of hippie poetics and into relative specificity. The song starts unpromisingly, with “Friends tell me it’s Spring / My window shows the same,” but by the second verse, Torrini’s projected her gaze outward, onto a preacher who’s “lost his son” after he caught him “with another son of God, feeding on the prayer.” It may not be John Darnielle, but we’ll take it.

From there, it’s steadily uphill, and Fisherman’s Woman closes with one of the year’s most arresting one-two punches. “Thinking Out Loud” sounds exactly like what its title implies. “If the telephone should ring,” she laments over a lazy guitar loop, “God knows it could never be him.” This is where our heroine fulfills the promise hinted at in earlier tracks, achieving a Chan Marshall-level of world-weary gorgeousness. The album’s final number, “Serenade,” is fragile, a little creepy, and breathtakingly beautiful; the sort of song you’ll find yourself playing on repeat as the soundtrack to long, restless night.

In a way, I find it oddly comforting that roughly half the record still doesn’t do much for me—all the more reason to keep coming back to it. Inquire again in a few months time, and this might just end up one of my favorite albums of 2005.