Released: 26/01/24
When it comes to artists aiming to mix an avant-garde, genre-bending experimental sensibility with danceable indie-rock, Torres – AKA Mackenzie Scott – is one of the best. While another artist blazing the same trail, St. Vincent, is undoubtedly a ridiculously talented guitar player, try as I might (and boy have I tried) to get into her music, I always just want so much more: viz., some some actual tunes – because, as any fan of Laurie Anderson or David Byrne and Talking Heads understands, actual melodies that you can hang your hat on are by no means exclusively the domain of mainstream pop. And if you do think that, as Clark seems to, in her perennial pastiching of the guttural mumbling and telephonic babble of Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – my god, you better be able to create music as weird and sublime as that incredible record. Which very few can.
All of which is to say that Scott, also a formidably good guitarist, understands that when her crystalline-yet-careworn voice carries a haunting melody over an imaginatively, much-fucked with processed backing track (courtesy of What An Enormous Room’s producer, Sarah Jaffe), as on, for example, the awesome ‘I Got the Fear – kind of like The Pastels fronted by Stevie Nicks – then it’s invariably going to sound more interesting than 90% of her peers who think it safest to stay within the boundaries of indie-rock rules. Thankfully for us, then, Scott’s mantra for this many-layered-yet-killer-hook-laden record was to ‘make it new’. And boy, has she.