review by Barbara Aria/Time Out New York, #147
Performing live, Torres has proved time and again that you don’t need a band when you’ve got a tape recorder and an echo machine. He’s a one-man sound subverter with an irreverent reverence for language. Responsible for most of the vast range of verbal, musical and nonmusical rhythms and cadences on Holy Kid, Torres screeched, blabs, croons and manipulates words like clay, managing to squeeze out of their substance powerful passages of elemental poetry, by turns stone-dense and ether-light. If you want to hear post-Dada techno-era metaphysical universe, spin this.

review by Kevin Sampsell/Plazm, #19-M009
Torres’ language hopscotch is one of the more exciting things happening in spoken word scenes these days. Kill Rock Stars, which has been enthusiastically releasing spoken word for years, has really struck gold on this one. The 23 tracks never sound the same, instead they are challenging, silly, serious, sexy, loud, quiet, and everywhere in between. And the amazing thing is how, well, Torresian each piece is. Backing music is provided by many guests, but it’s DJ Wally’s “Rhumba Bomballet” with its loping stride, and the closing, hypnotic “Pastoral Watusi,” that stand a bit taller than the rest. When mind-slapping shorties like “Mirror-Fuc-Cation” and “I.E. Dance” pop up, it makes you forget exactly where you are, what you’re listening to, what year it is. For pure literary weight, check out “We Speak Saying Nothing/Looking For The Frog Boys,” and then loosen up for the “Vacated Pool.” A friend of mine says it sounds like he’s speaking several different languages all at once, rolling his R’s like the Spanish, crushing his K’s like a German, fluttering his vowels as the French do. Or maybe it’s just a natural rhythm of the fantastic words he strings together.