Kevin Bronson on May 11th, 2016

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As Ben Cooper performed backdropped by bulb-lit trees on Tuesday night, it was easy to get lost in his forest.

Cooper — aka Radical Face — kicked off a U.S. tour at the sold-out Teragram Ballroom with a show that was good if you like cinematic music chonicled by a gifted storyteller and great if you’re familiar with the narratives in his trilogy of albums, “The Family Tree.” The last of those albums, “The Family Tree: The Branches,” was released in March, yet only one song, “Rivers in the Dust,” made it into Tuesday’s set.

If fact, if there’s a quibble about the 90-minute tour de force from Radical Face and his five-piece backing band, it’s that it lacked a narrative thread. Set to darkly orchestrated folk music, his trilogy began as the story of a fictional family named the Northcotes, told over multiple generations, vignetting abuse, malfeasance and other myriad dysfunction. Strangely, his own family experience began to parallel his fiction — including Cooper’s adoption of his sexually abused niece — and that largely informed the third album.

Displayed in the lobby of the Teragram were scrapbooks of photos and hand-written notes and lyrics for each of the albums; on the walls hung ghastly, straight-outta-the-1800s photographic prints.

The setlist, though, spanned the whole decade of Radical Face — including three songs (“Along the Road,” “Winter Is Coming” and “Welcome Home”) from the 2007 album “Ghost” that predated the trilogy, and two more from the EPs he released in between full-lengths. Of the latter, the mid-set “We’re On Our Way” instigated a clap-along that provided the evening’s biggest uplift.

The 34-year-old songwriter from Jacksonville, Fla., introduced most of the 13 songs with words of caution: “This is really depressing,” he said mildly before “Severus and Stone,” then segueing to “Along the Road” by joking, “I’m going to double down on depressing. This is about me talking to dead people in my dreams.” Alone, both songs are riveting lyrically and compositionally. Elsewhere, perhaps context would have elevated the set even more.

Radical Face performed four songs from 2013’s “The Branches,” the second installment in the trilogy. Early in the set came “Summer Skeletons,” a touching song about the innocence of youth in which Cooper sings, in his boyish voice, “Our fears had no teeth / Our hearts were still blind.” It’s among the most writerly songs in his canon. It was not until the encore that the band played “The Mute,” about an emotionally abused child who runs away, and “The Gilded Hand,” the nickname in the trilogy given to a factory owner who exploits child labor.

Even hopscotching around his catalog, Cooper proved as gifted a spinner of yarns as he was when he was just a folk singer with a guitar. “The highways are lined with graves / like the fingernails of giants,” he sings in that Dust Bowl lament, “Rivers of Dust.” Any connoisseur of imagery like that will find Radical Face’s trilogy most engrossing.

||| Previously: “The Road to Nowhere,” “Holy Branches,” “Pound of Flesh,”