Swiss-Albanian vocalist Elina Duni and pianist Colin Vallon follow up 2012’s Matane Malit with more traditional Balkan songs of love and exile – as Duni puts it, “exile is forever a wound” – performed in Albanian, which, despite the accompanying English texts, inevitably consigns this moving singer’s work to a niche. But Duni articulates every syllable with a penetrative delicacy that almost makes you imagine the air around her quivering, while Vallon and his bass-and-drums partners build cool ensemble-jazz variations out of minimal motifs, prepared-piano manipulations and circling hooks suggestive of Brad Mehldau or Tord Gustavsen. Duni expressively draws the sleepless-nights song Sytë beyond its pulsing melody over a vexed flutter from the drums; piano churnings and steady-state grooves on Ylberin convey a sense of time standing still; and friskier tunes such as Taksirat (The Mishap) or the ecstatically awestruck Bukuroshe (Beautiful Girl) exert a forlorn charm. Duni and Vallon have staked out a very personal territory, but the secrets they unearth in it are often irresistible.
