There’s a degree of would-be myth to Adam Torres’ backstory. He first gained some local notoriety as an undergraduate in Athens, Ohio in the middle of the ’00s, performing solo shows and playing guitar for indie-folk outfit Southeast Engine, heroes of that Ohio scene. In 2006, he self-released his first solo album at the age of 20, Nostra Nova, an album that developed a cult-classic status in the decade since, and a slightly greater visibility upon its reissue via Misra Records last year. While whispers slowly spread of this songwriter you’d never heard of, Torres himself was mostly absent in those ensuing ten years before returning with Pearls to Swine, his first full-fledged release since Nostra Nova.
All those years removed from *Nostra Nova *it sounds like he returned as a ghost. Torres spent some time volunteering in Ecuador before resettling to Austin, TX to earn his graduate degree and work to help improve the water quality of the Rio Grande, all while releasing a spate of lo-fi demos he recorded in his closet. On Pearls to Swine, his songs are earnest and full of yearning, yet still difficult to divine the concrete relatability that lives within. It transcends his humble Ohio roots, a work of startling beauty that sits in your head like a half-remembered dream: you keep returning to it, trying to approach it from different angles and catch the secrets you’re missing before they slip away into the haze.
Torres’ voice is without a doubt the thing he’s known for and will be remembered by. It has an unearthly quality. Throughout Pearls To Swine, he sings in a ruminative falsetto that is able to bend in directions that defy the shape and scope of the human form. In the album’s stunning opener, “Juniper Arms,” he begins in near-wordlessness, a place he coasts in and out of before occasionally dropping back down to earth for a bit of clarity. The song is about Albuquerque, where Torres was born, as well as Austin, where he lives, but the words “Juniper arms” are the only ones in focus during the chorus. It’s like Torres tries to wrap his arms around the idea of home while drifting around it just out of reach.
There are more traditional moments like “High Lonesome” and “Morning Rain,” moments where Torres remains front-and-center over finger-picked guitar parts, where you could hear him as a compromise between Neil Young’s ’70s broken-angel croon and Jeff Buckley’s celestial melodies. Then there are the counterpoints where he lets himself go to those otherworldly places, like when his voice and the strings meld into one unsettling current in “Daydream.” He has a way of crafting songs that lure you out with their beauty before revealing its underlying rage.
Though Torres’ gorgeous and idiosyncratic voice is a major selling point of* Pearls to Swine*, it’s bolstered by his meditations on the tangible experience, much of it derived from the life Torres lived between records. Just as the experiences that birthed Nostra Nova were inextricably rooted in small college-town circuits and in the music community in Athens, the new record feels at one with the Texas landscape. There’s a sweeping whine in the string drone of “Outlands,” like wind coursing across the Chihuahuan Desert. It feels like a return journey after traversing the desolation and spending the bulk of a decade removed from his calling.
That gives the penultimate track, “Mountain River,” a climactic tone with Torres singing “I’m trying to find my way back home” all before the epilogue of “City Limits.” A tension permeates these songs: Torres sounds road-weary, but also like he’s trying to grasp the wonder that’s still out there in America. It’s a tension that many artists working in some strain of contemporary Americana touch on, like those cosmic Americana troubadours Ryley Walker, Steve Gunn, and William Tyler. It won’t reproduce the same kind of direct, intimate engagement the once-unknown *Nostra Nova *did. But Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come.
