Torres, Torres [Review]

Torres

Torres

(Self-released)

Jan. 22, 2013

Recorded in Franklin, Tenn., at Tony Joe White's home studio while The Swamp Fox himself was, for the most part, out of town, Torres is the debut album by the eponymous Torres, aka Mackenzie Scott, a soon-to-be-22-year-old Nashville singer-songwriter freshly graduated from Belmont University's songwriting program. Originally from Macon, Ga., Scott took up the Torres moniker — "a family name," she says — as a way of officially delineating a fresh artistic start after performing and releasing an EP under her own name. (Acquiring an electric guitar had something to do with the decision, as did fear of disappearing in a sea of Nashville first-name-last-names.) While uncertain in places and unrealized in others — side effects, perhaps, of a fast and ad-hoc recording process — Torres marks a promising and occasionally staggering first effort.

If the descriptors "Nashville singer-songwriter" and "Belmont University songwriting program" carry some expectation baggage — Music Row aspirations, soulless professional polish — Torres sheds them easily. Skeletal arrangements gird hauntingly personal songs, and slightly misplayed notes go uncorrected by Pro Tools or other digital wallpapering.

The impossibly delicate "November Baby," which features a beautifully sung harmony from fellow Nashvillian Natalie Prass, whom Scott calls a friend and inspiration, shows off Scott's quietly assured songwriting. But more than anything, it is Scott's voice that carries the album — at times haltingly intimate, at times wounded and fierce, at others some combination of the three. There's nothing showy about the way she sings, even if she verges on overt theatricality at times, but not many indie rockers can pull off such an honest, untrained-sounding timbre and still harmonize so ably on tape at little more than a whisper.