Review Summary: Buried a hatchet, it's coming up lavender
In responding to trauma through a means of internalisation - or rather, deviation inward - singer-songwriter Adam Torres incubates pain to birth something altogether despondent, though nonetheless beautiful on EP
I Came to Sing the Song. While its melancholia is self-indulgent, and its devotion to dark tones dramatic, there is a bluntness that cuts through on Torres’ follow-up to breakthrough album
Pearls to Swine - a straightforwardness that permits a great deal of emotional fervour, but also manages to tear its skin down to the bone. And what is revealed is something raw and undistilled. It’s mature and honest. Sitting cross-legged and attentive, in a world stripped of its colour, Adam’s most apparent strengths - his brittle falsetto and penchant for honest song-writing - lack a certain pretence. Perhaps to an extent that is ultimately severe, but his mission statement could not be clearer: and he sings his songs well.
With a ceaseless though warm falsetto, the singer-songwriter sets heart-on-his-sleeve ramblings atop ascending guitar chimes on the project’s title track. In spite of its bleak production, the song is indeed warm - its sound is a black canvas dotted with whites, perhaps, splashes of deep though faded blue, and purple even. A verdure stains ‘Green Mountain Song’, on the other hand - if not for the evocation of its title, then for the bounciness of its bass notes and driving acoustic. Gould’s flautistry, appearing at regular intervals throughout
I Came to Sing the Song, soundtracks the drive up a lush mountainside. Dragged through mud, ‘Hatchet’ stiffens its upper limp and trudges on. It is the colour of all bad bruises. Stripped down, Adam Torres boasts a sense of ease within his songwriting. Yet it is wrapped within its surrounding instrumentation, however, that what magic was once hidden within these compositions is brought to the surface. An arrangement of flutes and violins, even sprinkles of vibraphone, appear for brief moments to cast spells, before disintegrating once more, as if shrouds of smoke - or like winged instruments staining canvases lavender, feathers knotting dried blood.
A veil is lifted on
I Came to Sing the Song. Beneath it, Adam Torres finds comfort in truth - or bearing his heart down, rather: in breaking down walls. Because he refuses to utilise bluntness as a façade, nor as a means for something more poetic. Indeed, the project does have its fair share of unbridled poetics - the singer-songwriter has an (un)enviable penchant for melodrama - but each tune is laden with themes as direct as the title itself. Branded as offshoots to the
Pearls to Swine sessions, the project’s tracklisting represents something distinct:
I Came to Sing the Song explores what it is to find meaning within one’s own art. On the title track - and indeed, throughout each of the four songs - Torres laments transience. Amongst the bluebirds, for whom he demands the listener’s attention, he pines for permeance. And watching them flutter their wings, he finds beauty in the intermediate.
I’d rather not divulge the whole of an interpretation, for the project is short. But I’ll conclude with a note on ‘Hatchet’:
Whilst it is the EP’s most straightforward, and by lengths, its least cryptic, its effect is perhaps most representative. On it, Adam buries a hatchet deep within his heart. Despite this description - as brutal as it is idiomatic - the songs bleed something altogether colourful. A heart so fecund with honest sadness sprouts something altogether beautiful: lilacs, poppies, lavender. That mightn’t make much sense, but cut deeper and see what blooms.
