Tenci at The Lilypad, 11/11/22

“You guys can scooch up!” Jess Shoman, the mind behind Tenci, cheerfully tells the crowd four songs into their set. Until then, most in attendance had been giving the band a good three feet berth—there isn’t really a distinction between the stage and the pit at the Lilypad, where Tenci was performing that night, and the crowd was erring on the safe side by gathering a bit away from the band and the tangle of wires and cords. At Shoman’s request, though, the audience moved forward; some people even sat down on the floor, looking attentively at the four-piece band. Tenci’s polite request is indicative of the music the band makes: genuine, warm, and forthright; music that warrants closeness and community. I discovered Tenci’s debut album My Heart is an Open Field last winter and immediately fell in love with their warm folk-meets-slowcore sound, taking shape in deceptively simple arrangements punctuated with saxophone swells and Shoman’s evocative voice. The songs came into my life at a time when I was making a conscious effort to find joy in the ordinary, and My Heart Is An Open Field gave me permission to look. If their first album was Tenci showing us how to find it, their follow-up, A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing, is a celebration of our newfound joy as much as a venture in throwing caution to the wind and continuing to seek the happiness we deserve. Most of the songs Tenci performed that Friday night were from A Swollen River, and it was what I listened to on the bus to the Lilypad, taking turns looking at the album cover (where Shoman is being drenched by pots of water being poured on her by her bandmates) and glancing outside at the similarly wet conditions.

Instead of traveling with a consistent opener, Tenci opted to have local bands on their bills instead. Opening at this stop was The Most Beautiful Moth in America and Hour. TMBMIA appeared to be a standard tight indie-rock 4-piece, yet their music was anything but, with the lead vocalist half-singing, half-yodeling about sharks, rats, butterflies without wings, and other animals often underrepresented in musical contexts. Hour, on the other hand, consisted of a cellist and a classical guitarist, an odd combination that provided spellbinding instrumentals that floated through the Lilypad. Eventually, Shoman and her bandmates Izzy True, Curtis Oren, and Joseph Farago emerged from the audience (Shoman was actually standing next to me during Hour’s set) to get on stage and begin setting up. After a couple minutes, they indicated they were ready before launching into their first song of the night, “Blue Spring”, a song that’s actually about a green spring and a blue Shoman, who holds onto hope in the shape of a flower, begging not to be forgotten. “I’m good, I’m here/I’m good, I’m here,” Shoman and True chant in harmony at the end of the song, as if trying to remind themselves of their worth. The rest of the band were in perfect harmony during the “freakout” sections of the song, lurching forward on each beat as Oren’s saxophone shrieked, True’s bass yelped, and Farago’s drums thumped along. Tenci’s unwavering steadiness shone through the rest of their set: their rendition of “Joy”, for instance, almost made me tremble out of my skin, with Shoman crying out “I’m full of desire, don’t know if it’s mine,” warping and warbling the last note over the sounds of Oren’s flute. “Be,” my personal standout from A Swollen River, was another highlight of the set, with the minute-long outro at the end extended even further, as the band went wild on their instruments.

This synergy didn’t just come through in their music, though. Tenci has, in my opinion, some of the funniest inter-song banter I’ve experienced. Explaining their bits would be an injustice (you simply had to be there!), but just know that any band that manages to riff on the Paisley Snail Case is an automatic winner for me. It’s clear Tenci likes to inject moments of levity into their craft: at one part during the track “Sharp Wheel” on A Swollen River, you hear a clown horn, which Oren replicated live with his saxophone, garnering a hearty chuckle from the audience. Tenci’s music exists at the intersection of inside jokes and stolen glances between solos, between the last note of a sustained four-person harmony and the silence that fills the room after, much like the one the band sings at the end of “Two Cups,” saying they won’t wait to “fill [their] cup” and find the fulfillment they’re seeking. In that sudden quiet that follows, with Farago, Oren, Shoman, and True staring out into the crowd at the Lilypad, basking in the audience and in each other’s presence, it seems like they might have found it.