At a time when the saturation of current pop prevents us from clearly discerning the diamonds in the rough found among the tons of irrelevant and generic products, coming across disruptive and non-conforming proposals such as that of the North American Mackenzie Scott, aka TORRESthey automatically make you make peace with the genre and feel deep within the unusual intensity that “What An Enormous Room” he proposes to us.
The sixth studio album in the career of the singer from Orlando is an excellent example of the progression that the artist has experienced throughout this decade, overlooking more anodyne chapters of the same (“Silver Tongue”20) and managing to bring together in a single proposal the best hits of the innocent intimacy of his debut (“Torres”13) and the experimental risk of its most lucid passages (“Three Futures”, 17). The years and experience have also managed to reward Scott’s work with a particular patina of his own personality that has helped him to definitively separate himself from his most manifest and patent influences (to the strong inheritance of the sound of St. Vincent in his “Thirstier” 2021 we mean) and has allowed you to find in this new stage the necessary ingredients to turn a mere blank canvas into a captivating minimalist landscape of extreme beauty.
Combining the depth of her voice with exquisite lo-fi style production (signed by Sarah Jaffe), TORRES wanders along the inscrutable paths of existentialism, verbalizing aloud recurring thoughts of restlessness and anxiety that he intends to turn into shared reflections (“You, panicking / In the public bathroom stall, your chest is in free fall / You’re not alone in there”we hear him sing in “I Got the Fear”), in order to lighten their load. Likewise, the especially meticulous and elegant use of electronics and synthesizers in this work ends up becoming the main attraction of the bulk of its cuts, with examples such as the track that will give its name to the album in its respective lyrics, using a very similar tone. to the tribute to Talking Heads (“Jerk Into Joy”), the enveloping and Martian base of “Ugly Mistery”or the theatrical “Collect”, where we see her masterfully create a round passage of dark and overloaded industrial pop.
Even lacking the power of other more central cuts, themes such as “Life As We Don’t Know It” o “Forever Home” are another great example of the unprejudiced gaze with which TORRES is now approaching this new adventure, testing itself in unique tessituras and unprecedented tonal crossroads, where it pleases to go from high to low without transitions and with a lot of drama. A liberating pretext that leads her to place total control of the album’s lyrics in the hands of her broken heart until she sees it spawn in a visceral, tear-jerking and cinematic way. “Songbird Forever” key with a taste of farewell. Resigned, broken, fascinated, furious, satirical and conscious, TORRES precisely converts the space of “What An Enormous Room” in a wonderful stay in which to get to know each other better and let the emotions flow together to the point of rapture.
What an enormous room de TORRES