When fashion rocks (gently)

Designer Kate Torralba has reinvented herself as a neurotic, drunk-on-your-love singer-songwriter. But is her emotionally messy but sonically sleek debut album any good?

You can’t be blamed for raising an eyebrow at the prospect of a local fashion designer putting out an album. After all, there’s a specie of Filipino designer that’s more ostentatious than most, self-promotion sometimes going to extremes on social media, the posturing in society magazines sometimes crossing over to self-parody. But you’ll be comforted to know that this is Kate Torralba we’re talking about.

She never really seemed to fit in, anyway — a Cyndi Lauper-esque pixie persona spreading fairy dust in the dog days of the mid-2000s local blog scandals. While she was one of Manila’s most buzzed-about designers, with retail stores, a department store line, a hosiery line, and a production line under her belt, fashion was never what she set out to do. “My fashion career seemed to just spring from out of nowhere and with very little effort,” she told me in a previous interview. “It was (society figures like) Tim Yap and Tessa Prieto-Valdes who sprinkled their fairy dust on me and all of a sudden, this little girl who just made clothes for fun — and sure, for profit — during her spare time became a designer.”

A piano prodigy in her toddler years (she taught herself how to play the piano at four), she began formal training at seven and played a concert in Los Angeles at nine years old. In college, her band won Song of the Year at the San Miguel Beer Cebu Music Awards and had decent airplay in Cebu, her hometown. Music was where she started in.

It only makes sense then that when she found herself burned out by fashion, she would recalibrate and run back to music. After reacquainting herself with the local live music scene, playing hole-in-the-wall haunts like Saguijo, she’s gone as far as playing LA’s Troubadour, the same place that introduced legends like James Taylor and Carole King to the public.

Her debut album “Long Overdue” is the culmination of all these year—”The Miseducation of Kate Torralba,” if you must. And it’s also, predictably, an album about love. On Northfleet, one of the album’s highlights, she sings “I wanna know what happened then / I wanna think about something else / But it’s been up and down / It’s so hard / The way that you left.” She’s playing a romance Nancy Drew on the album, piecing together the fragments of a relationship through pictures, memories, and songs.

She had an able army of collaborators on “Long Overdue” — local music industry’s stalwarts (her main collaborator Malek Lopez, as well as Diego Mapa, Jazz Nicolas, Wendell Garcia and Armi Millare), as well as some veteran studio talents from Los Angeles, where the album was mastered (including S. Husky Höskulds, the Grammy-winning audio engineer of Sheryl Crow’s “The Globe Sessions” and the Norah Jones hit Come Away With Me).

Sometimes, this musical promiscuity backfires. While still enjoyable, the Diego Mapa co-produced Get Me, for example, sounds like Kate singing over a Tarsius song, rather than Tarsius backing her on a Kate song. But it’s a debut album and it’s only jarring because the rest of it hangs squarely on Kate’s shoulders. There’s no identity crisis here. Save for a misstep or two, the album’s biggest achievement is—despite drawing inspiration from a varied list of influences (everyone from Aimee Mann to the Whitest Boy Alive)—“Long Overdue” rarely sounds like someone else’s album, an achievement for any debut. Kate Torralba, after all, is telling her own story.

And “Long Overdue” is best when Kate Torralba isn’t trying to be cool (which the electronica flourishes sometimes suggest). When she gets weird and neurotic and emotionally messy, she’s perfect, tipping her hat to Todd Rundgren on Monkey Song (Nokiesque), playing stalker on Video’s almost Giorgio Moroder-esque disco swagger, or playing fantasy football with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club on Anywhere With You.

Drunk On Your Love and Under My Stars are evocative songs about complicated relationships. On the former, she’s devoted but desperate. On the latter, she’s distant and conflicted, a love song with intimacy issues. I mean it in the best way possible when I say these songs would sound at home in a twee Canadian Sarah Polley romantic-dramedy starring Michelle Williams.

The album ends and begins with Pictures though, a breakup song that revels in the mementos of a relationship — discarded pictures, reckless letters, lovers that were swayed, offers they gave up on. As the album’s closer, a “cinematic version” replete with strings and shades of a happier Tori Amos at her most orchestral, Pictures is a triumph in widescreen, a bittersweet kiss-off that gains in strength as the strings pile on top of each other.

I prefer the Pictures that opens the album though. No strings, no widescreen — just a girl on the piano, and an able jazz band adding heft when needed. In this version, the music sounds like the lyrics — the neurotic lists of the verses (“There were letters that I wrote / reckless letters that I quote / reckless letters that you wrote ‘bout me”) going bump in the sleepless, post-breakup night, arm in arm with the tentative pitter-patter of her piano. Two-thirds into the song, when her voice gains in strength and nails “I can read the lines, I can see the light,” sturdy piano chords crash into her confident singing and you hear the sound of fulfilled promise, the sound of an artist stumbling into her voice.

On “Long Overdue,” Kate Torralba, finally,  is home.

***

The Kate Torralba Long Overdue Asian Tour makes a Manila stop at Live Vibe Centrale Music Lounge (Third level, A. Venue Mall, Makati Avenue, Makati City) today, 8 p.m.  The evening features a unique benefit gig: REQUEST-A-THON, an all-request concert conceptualized by the designer-musician.