American artist, TORRES, aka Mackenzie Scott follows up her 2017 album, Three Futures, with an impressively intimate, heart felt voyage on Silver Tongue.
With an album title like that, it certainly behooves one to bring that quality of speaking and writing to the narrative of their songs. Luckily, TORRES has more than enough wit and poetic prowess to step up to the plate. Lyrics are impressive here as they cover themes such as fading love, environmentalism, love, and uncertainty that keeps a conversational tone, but feels incredibly intimate.
The nine songs on here never feel like songs, but more like Scott delving deep into journal entries that just so happen to have beautiful melodies and incredible instrumentation to back up these stories. Never intrusive nor cringe-worthy, but serving as an incredible insight on human emotion and experiences in a world where we have grown to keep others at an arm’s length. The songs presented on the record also showcase amazing production with lush synths, drum machines, glitchy effects, reverb vocals, and the occasional flirting with other genres that often compliment each other rather than clashing with narrative the album presents.
“Records of Your Tenderness” features folk-like vocals mixed with drum machines while “Good Grief” ventures into some grunge territory. “Gracious Day” is a beautiful acoustic guitar song that features some effects in the background that seem intended to keep the instrument motifs together with the rest of the track listing. The songs on this album serve more as a form of art rather than to serve commercial appeal. These are not the songs you will find in clubs, bars, shopping malls, or car commercials.
In place, these tracks seem to serve as a means to relate to the listener and share common experiences in life. Silver Tongue is a masterful album that invites the listener to partake in such beautiful writing and instrumentation that expertly mixes pop with a variety of different genres but never loses focus on itself or the narrative at hand. Its view on the human experience is something that brings listeners to relate to what is being said. With terrific production and equally impressive instrumentation, TORRES delivers a lyrically and instrumentally impressive album.
By Caleb Ortiz