For his show last Thursday at the Cactus Café on the University of Texas campus, songwriter Adam Torres revived a number of older tunes to celebrate the re-release of his underground gem Nostra Nova, which was just reissued on April 21st by Misra Records. Adam Torres wrote and released his album Nostra Nova when he was nineteen and twenty years old. This fact is utterly staggering and entirely understandable all at once. The album’s excellent arrangements and consistently brilliant songwriting sound mature, but in these rousing ballads and rockers lies the unmistakable courage of a young adventurer undaunted by the weight of years. He draws from sounds prevalent in the early part of this century, but the album’s core essence reflects a tone unique to Torres.
While his recent shows have been solo endeavors, Torres recruited a full band to recreate these songs on Thursday night. Consisting of an all-star cast of Lauren Gurgiolo (Okkervil River), Matthew Shepherd (Dana Falconberry, Feverbones), Aisha Burns (Balmorhea), Chris Cox (Feverbones), and Michael St. Clair (The Polyphonic Spree, Okkervil River), the band lived up to high expectations with careful, restrained instrumentation and subtle tones and textures. The ensemble rendered the songs of Nostra Nova with impeccable fidelity to create a riveting evening of music.
Torres wrote these songs living in Athens, Ohio — another Athens, if you will. While the community in Georgia that gave birth to R.E.M., Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples in Stereo, and many more bands, has been the subject of much praise and renown over the years, a less celebrated community in the American Midwest sustained a like-minded troupe of musicians and artists. House shows and small gatherings of dedicated friends held together a scene, and you can hear this sort of intimacy and love and wonder in the songs still today.
Although it’s almost a decade later, Nostra Nova has finally received the release it deserves. However, perhaps the most important part of this story is that Adam now belongs to Austin. We’ve received a true gift right here in our own community. You can hear him play on many weeks — solo or with his wife Caitlin Kraus-Torres in the bands Inner Suns and Besos de Lobos. Nostra Nova is a treasure that you should purchase for sure, but the gift of Adam Torres hasn’t stopped giving. Inner Suns play this Wednesday at Hotel Vegas, and more shows are sure to be in the near future for all of these musical projects. While we can’t go back to the Athens that Adam knew and loved in the early 2000s, the spirit of community in music never dies. It is people and community that give birth to great art. Here in Austin, you can be a part of it, as player or participant.
To evidence that communal bond in our fair city, Torres invited friends Aisha Burns and Cross Record to open the evening. Burns performed a set of gentle, poignant songs backed by cello and bass while Cross Record delivered another powerful and haunting set of experimental, electric folk songs as we have come to expect. All three of these acts represent some of Austin’s best. A nod of encouragement goes to the Cactus Café, who have a reputation for staying true to their Americana roots but have recently had the foresight to book a sizable number of Austin bands adept at merging the traditions of folk with the forward thinking musicality of rock and experimentation. We hope to see more of that from this historic room in the future.
All photographs © Bryan C. Parker & Pop Press International; click any image to open set in slideshow viewer.
