Torres: "Cowboy Guilt"
Mackenzie Scott doesn’t cut herself much slack in her songs, but “Cowboy Guilt” is one of liberation—of putting on your well-worn Sunday best to take Holy Communion from a hip flask for the first time, crying with laughter in the company of new friends who didn’t know you back when. “We drowned out winter livers with bleary expectation,” she sings, capturing their hazy, triumphant mission with grace. “Three southern spines to the wind.”
On Sprinter, her second album as Torres, Scott traveled to England to work with producer/drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Ian Ollivers, who both played on PJ Harvey’s Dry, along with Portishead’s Adrian Utley on guitar. Their combined heft is obvious on Sprinter‘s raging “Strange Hellos”, but “Cowboy Guilt” is as light as Scott’s sweet relief at the easy episode it documents, hinging around the kind of inverted silvery riff that St. Vincent plied on Strange Mercy. It’s agile and modernist, but never showy, dotted with wobbly electronic touches that underpin the sense of Scott tentatively finding her footing in this free new world.
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