Three Futures

While the use of synthesizers, programmed drums, modular instruments, and even Scott’s purposefully stilted guitar riffs give the album its background, it’s a framework designed to confront the nature of the human body itself. Three Futures is overwhelmed with senses.

Easy listening it isn’t, but Three Futures cuts into the tangled complexities of human connection with an uncannily unwavering precision.

More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives.

The fascinating ways she puts songs and stories together on Three Futures reveals more with each listen.

She’s still a sprinter on Three Futures. But she looks back at what’s been lost with accrued wisdom and a literary eye for sensual detail, resulting in one of the year’s most thoughtful left turns.

Three Futures is a slow burn, but Torres doesn’t require speed, not when she can hold our attention with something more akin to intense eye contact.

It touches the heart and head with its examinations of love, lust and desire, and while it’s sometimes still a challenging listen, it’s easy to indulge in.

The dissonant guitars and whirring synths land on the more accessible side of avant-garde rock, veering into sia-esque pop on tracks like "Greener Stretch," though revelling in never quite resolving its melodies. [Nov 2017, p.36]

The album’s sonic homogeneity lends it an air of sameness at first blush, but the details burrow their way out on subsequent listens; the guitar work, in particular, offers fleeting doses of delightfully understated melodicism to counterpoint the slow industrial grind beneath.

The music is now lush where once it was loud, layered and thoughtful where it was immediate.

It's not an easy listen--"Greener Stretch" is one of the rare songs that has an immediate hook--but it commands, and rewards, attention. [No. 147, p.61]

Her narrative sees all, experiences all, but keeps a remove in the dry, mechanical beats, the tamped down drama of synthetic accompaniment, the vocal lines that only once and a while slip past a murmur into wilder swoops and yelps. This is a cerebral, abstracted album about the physical, one that deals in potentialities and implied trajectories, rather than the immediacy of pulse and sweat and organ functions.

Her latest is even more raw, offering conflicted images of emotional and physical release over bracing industrial-rock textures co-produced by Rob Ellis.

Where there is fervour, Three Futures stands up to be counted. Without it, the record rattles along at all too a subdued pace.