REVIEW: Timberline — Florescence (LP)
Timberline and Macy Warner collaborate in a devilishly underrated project called Messy, but while I dig what they can produce in the studio together as a band, what the former has just dropped as a solo player in the new album Florescence has left me with chills since first listening to it. Almost a year after it hit record store shelves, the hype surrounding Florescence isn’t dying down but getting stronger as a larger audience of both critics and listeners gets exposed to trending songs like “February 13th,” “Second Guess,” and “August Snows,” the third of which is a personal favorite of mine. There are no big synthetic bells and whistles to come between artist and audience in this piece, as is the case in his work with Messy, but from what I can tell this is a definitively more personal effort on his part.
POST LINE RECORDS: https://www.facebook.com/pg/plotlinerecords/posts/
“Flannel,” “Better Days,” and “Static” show off the maturing lyricist side of Timberline while “Temporary” and “Long Sleeves” are a bit more wistful and centered on his string play, but together they showcase the sort of duality we’ve been missing from the greater indie singer/songwriter pool in the American underground lately. Florescence takes every opportunity it’s granted to turn us onto themes of a split nature; love and hate, hot and cold, winter and summer, but it’s through this very theme that we’re able to properly understand the symbolism of growth he’s illustrating here — and far more adeptly than some of the bigger names in the game right now could have.
Emotionality lives in the strings of “Horsetooth,” “So Lost,” “Hi,” the title track, “Shade,” and “Every Night,” but not in the forced, plasticized way a lot of Bon Ivar content started to show off in the mid-2010s. For example, if you took Timberline out of the equation entirely for a performance of “Every Night,” I don’t think that a guitar would remain the right instrument for the song — it’s his voice that brings something out of the string play in this record, and in a way that more or less reflects his authenticity as an organic singer/songwriter. Synthetics aren’t a part of his journey, and that’s something we can’t argue with after breaking down the tracklist of Florescence as a whole.
True to the hipster harmonies you remember from your Occupy Wall Street days but cosmetically adapted to a more modern look in the DIY and indie-folk communities, Florescence is a generational bridge for fans of the alternative singer/songwriter movement and a testament to the erosion of scene politics this industry has collectively experienced in the digital age. Unafraid to be himself and go out on a limb no matter what the material he’s recording is, Timberline has more than a couple of heroic moments in this record that make me want to come back for more of his work in the near future, and if you haven’t been spinning this new LP all summer, you need to make a point of picking up one of the best acoustic records of 2020 or 2021 immediately.
Colin Jordan
