Tiberius -- Troubadour
Stefanie Cuthbert reviews the intimate highs and desolate lows of Troubadour, the long-awaited album from Boston's farm emo band Tiberius.
Troubadour, the debut album from Boston four-piece Tiberius, sounds like a travelogue as much from its confessional, diary-like lyrics as the seamless blend of genres conjuring a myriad of backgrounds and sounds. It’s a concoction the band lovingly dub “farm emo” – and it’s certainly an apt description.
Musically, the album skews more emo than Americana with tracks like ‘Redwood’ calling to mind the wounded confessionalism of Foxing’s Dealer and the sense of wistfulness on The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Harmlessness. It also finds kinship with the folkier fringes of contemporary emo, with perhaps its closest comparison in The Hotelier.
But there’s plenty of country to be found here too, the most overt being "It Has to be True" with its harmonica, pedal steel guitar, and drum shuffle. "Painting of a Tree," meanwhile, deftly fuses emo and country with the addition of pained, punky vocals. And, of course, that twang from Brendan Wright (they/them), often delivered on a laugh in songs including "Sag" and "Tag," it creates an intimacy, as though Wright is singing to the individual listener alone.
This intimacy grants the entire album a warmth and familiarity, as though you’ve been experiencing it for years already. The lyrics, while often simple, have a rawness and vulnerability that, as in "Sitting," feel like being addressed by an old friend: “There’s stains on my shirt and toast in my teeth” and “I don’t have to be right with you if I’m right with myself” or, as on "It Has to be True": “Sometimes you laugh and you love and sometimes it just sucks.”
This closeness is also keenly felt in moments when Wright’s voice gains reverb and the band swells, creating a live sounding environment, a sense of healing through music. Wright themself was “experiencing ego death” during the creation of the record, adding to its twinkly transcendence and the feeling of burdens being shed like so many skins.
The most heart-wrenching moments come with album closer "Barn," banjo and harmonica playing to each other like uncertain lovers before the distortion kicks in. “I love you to the bone, and I just want you to know how much I thought you were my home”. It also ends with a voiceover which, although a Midwestern emo cliché, feels not only earned here but appropriate.
Yet there’s also the jangle of indie guitars, the expansive fuzz of shoegaze, and touches of psychedelia defying any easy categorisation. It’s a throughline for the whole project, whether in how Tiberius existed as a solo project for a decade before this debut label release, or Wright’s own non-binary identity. The result is an album that feels expansive and intimate, self-assured but vulnerable, heartbreaking but healing.
