Ruminating on Torres’ debut, some lines from Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s ”Florence Berlin” surfaced: “Maybe hearts are better, bitter, battered, filthy, vulgar — maybe that’s why the broken, lonely ones, they hold on a little longer.” Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres, has crafted a debut that holds on long after it’s over, probably because it’s the sound of her publicly ripping off a Band-Aid, having first been battered, broken, and lonely.
Scott wisely pushes her voice front and center here, and it’s both disarming and brilliant. Raw and haunting, scrawling yet smooth, her voice sometimes sounds reminiscent of female ’90s alt-rock icons, and sometimes embodies the same stunning qualities as Sharon Van Etten. Stylistically, she spans from rock to folk, never fully settling between them. The songs are guitar-based, sometimes distorted, sometimes clean, and use other instruments very minimally, and the simplicity works in her benefit. “Honey,” the lead single, is an impeccable, nearly six-minute admission of the paralyzing effects the subject’s cruel indifference has wreaked on Scott’s heart. The intensity builds to a roar as she reiterates her frustration over and over in her mind, allowing the distortion to leak into her throat, and the song ends in stifling defeat — “maybe some other time, then…”.
There’s a definite darkness to the deeply confessional lyrics. Take the last song, “Waterfall,” in which she sings, “The rocks beneath, they bare their teeth. They all conspire to set me free. I set my teeth and contemplate all the possibilities.” Finishing it off with my favorite line, “Oh, waterfall, do you ever think maybe it will all be better in the morning? From way up here, it looks so calm. Do you ever make it halfway down and think, god, I never meant to jump at all?”
Torres’ debut feels intimate, heavy, and epic. It’s going to be one of those records where you end up choosing a different favorite track every week as you dissect and dig deeper and deeper into the grit of it all, until eventually every track is your favorite. It resonates because we all know what it feels like to be injured, then cringe and tear the Band-Aid away.