Review Summary: Living up to its namesake, What an enormous room finds Torres abandoning guitar hero antics for the sparse and spacey.
Truth be told,
What an enormous room is a tough nut to crack.
Mackenzie Scott aka Torres seemingly eschews all the lessons learned from finding paydirt on 2021’s electrifying
Thirstier in favor of a more nebulous soundscape. Much of the project’s aesthetics bring to mind the Pitchforkmaxxing that a lot of indie acts did during that publication’s heyday that would often leave a younger version of myself feeling inadequate for not getting “it”, despite a complete absence of “it” to begin with. Gone are the loud, flamboyant proclamations that served as a baseball bat to the shin; in are quiet, fuzzy contemplations that invite rather than announce. Picture “Glycerine” by Bush as an album, and you’re on the right track.
But that’s not entirely true. “Collect” is a barn-burning middle finger that dials up the amps and a plucky piano suitable for the Downloading Roster Update… box in whatever EA Sports game is your poison. It’s a zag within the zag that, while decent enough on its own merits, is a little too much on an otherwise tranquil and contemplative album. You can practically hear the gears turning in Scott’s head that this is a much-needed Break-In-Case-of Boredom safety valve placed directly in the middle of the album to wake anyone up who might’ve fallen asleep.
It’s a damn shame, because
room feels like it’s often on the verge of something vital and potent but just can’t quite get across the finish line for whatever reason. The dots are cool as hell, but the lines that connect them aren’t very sturdy. Take the exceedingly cool “Happy man’s shoes”, which calls to a duel at high noon in the desert only to be followed by the goofiest song on offer in “Life as we don’t know it” only to pivot back to the plodding, haunting “I got the fear.” The connective tissue is clearly there, but it’s mangled.
“Jerk into joy” is the clear highlight of the album, serving as a thesis for not only
room but perhaps the Torres project as a whole, to choose life in the face of death. On it, Scott manages to capture the moment where an opaque future suddenly becomes infinite possibilities with the refrain of “what an enormous room/ look at all the dancing I can do.” There are no face-melting guitar solos, in fact the guitar here hardly exists at all except for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it allusion to “Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head”, yet the sparse percussion and spacey melodies make me want to Tom Cruise jump on my couch in jubilation. It is a “HELL YES”, eureka moment that brilliantly slides all the pieces into place, the gesturing at monumental emotions actualizing into actual monumental emotions, and makes the album’s vision suddenly become crystal clear. It is an incredible ending to the album, the issue is that two songs still remain. Again, “Forever home” and “Songbird forever” are good enough songs unto themselves, but they reset a counter that was at some impossibly high number back to zero. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Still, there’s something here that keeps me coming back to search for something I feel I may be missing. Maybe my instinct with the album’s aesthetics was correct. There are simply too many points of interest, too much that the album gets right for
enormous room to be considered a failure and I want to keep solving for whatever Scott saw in their design. It is, after all, an enormous room. It’s gonna take some time to explore every nook and cranny.
