Torres, the debut album from 22-year-old Nashville native Mackenzie Scott, has a deceptively charming backstory. Scott’s family pooled their money together to buy the Gibson guitar that is heard on the album. It was recorded live to tape over the course of five days in the home of a Louisiana songwriter. Scott herself is a bright- eyed, beautiful young woman that simply looks happy to have the opportunity to share her music. Given such a pleasant, unassuming foundation, it is a welcome surprise that the album itself is a raw and gripping exploration of our most basic human emotions. Over simple and often sparse arrangem- ents, Scott unleashes her remarkably multi-faceted voice and lets the listener into the intimate moments of her life. She stands confused outside of a strangers house. A man ashes in his coffee. She looks down the face of a waterfall, wondering whether or not to jump. TORRES is a deeply personal record. However, through her stories of fear, heartbreak, inadequacy, and self-acceptance, Scott ultimately speaks to something universal.
The album opener, “Mother Earth, Father God,” with its languid strings set against distortion and solemn lyrics, quickly establishes TORRES’s diverse range of influences. There are hints of Chan Marshall’s raw recording style and emotional delivery, Joanna Newsom’s lilting flourishes, Alela Diane’s powerful and seductive vocal tone, and Julie Doiron’s juxtaposition of acoustic and electric sounds. It’s a song that portends an album filled with angst ridden americana, driving drum beats, and dark violin solos. However, the album that unfolds after the first track is far more adventurous than the first few minutes suggest. Scott finds her voice immediately and from there in makes bold instrumental decisions that surprise and enrapture, making for a gorgeous patchwork over which her stories are able to come to life. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
Torres is a promising young talent out of Nashville. Velvet-toned vocals and amped-up guitar fuzz.
TORRES knows the darkness. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter otherwise known as Mackenzie Scott waits until anything—an idea, an emotion, a memory—gnaws at her, tearing at her fingers and throat until she releases it in song.
Scott escaped the confines of her churning mind in order to find herself by recording Sprinter in the market town of Bridport in Dorset, England; and then at the Bristol studio of Portishead's Adrian Utley. With his guitar riffs and synthesizers lingering in the background like a lowland mist and PJ Harvey's Robert Ellis and Ian Olliver on rhythm—the two fortuitously reuniting 23 years after the release of Dry, and in Scott's 23rd year of living—she crafted a "space cowboy" record. "That's as simply as I can say it," says Scott, who cites inspirations as diverse as Funkadelic and Nirvana, Ray Bradbury and Joan Didion.
"I wanted something that very clearly stemmed from my Southern conservative roots but that sounded futuristic and space-y at the same time." It seems like an odd thing to look for in the picturesque seaside green, rolling hills in the south of England, but Scott had never been there before, and as a stranger in a strange land she found what she was looking for: a lost childhood. Sprinter was recorded in a room that had formerly been used as a children's nursery, which combined with the alien landscape fuels the self-searching that roils TORRES' music.
Following her self-titled debut in 2013, TORRES pushes herself to even noisier extremes on Sprinter, a punishing self-examination of epic spiritual and musical proportions.
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