Describing music as “confessional” can feel like a dirty word for singer-songwriters. Joni Mitchell rejected the term, likening it to the closest someone can come to calling her the N-word. St Vincent’s Annie Clark said she found it “slightly pejorative” when applied, as is so often the case, to female musicians. And last year Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres, deemed the descriptor a “four-letter word” for women in the music industry.
She’d perhaps be relieved to know that live, her emotive, grungey alt-rock doesn’t come across as confessional so much as cathartic. Its rough edges, typified by hand-plucked, distorted guitar lines and the thick wail of her voice, bristle against a humming intimacy. The result is at once alienating and welcoming. You want to shut your eyes and disappear into the buzzes of her guitar but could end up missing how generously she performs, sharing songs steeped in religious imagery and autobiographical reflection.
After a dramatic start – an empty stage, wisps of piped-in smoke and a looping electric guitar sample – Torres proves she doesn’t take herself as seriously as her two albums might have you think. She flits from the serious subject matter of Mother Earth, Father God and pared-back New Skin (sample lyric: “I am a tired woman / In January I will just be 23”) to a warm modesty: “Thank you all very much for being here,” she says, addressing the crowd for the first time. “This is awesome.”
Such an upbeat manner contrasts with her songs’ weight, though at times her lyrics disappear under the sludge of guitars, keyboards and booming tom-tom drums. She all but banishes what critics have characterised as a “strangulated” lack of relief, screeching during Strange Hellos and pushing herself as close to the edge of the stage as possible while choking her guitar neck on encore November Baby. It’s so raw and untamed, you wouldn’t want to call her confessional to her face.
