Led by Kyle Morton, Portland’s Typhoon have steadily established themselves as some of the best songwriters working right now. After developing something of a loyal following with an album and EP at the turn of the decade, the band released the majestic White Lighter in 2013, confirming the vision and scope hinted at in their previous releases.
Now, after Morton’s strong solo album What Will Destroy You, the band are back with Offerings, a brand new record to be released early next year. In what promises to be their most ambitious work yet, Typhoon channel everything from Bosch and Rorschach to Fellini and Lynch to create a rich concept album centring on a protagonist slowly succumbing to an amnesic abyss. As Morton describes:
“It’s a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without causality, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence / oblivion?
With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good fortune to stumble upon before it’s all over.”
And while we should probably reserve judgement until the full review, the record seems to exist within a wholly post-postmodern space. That is, detailing the reaction to our prolonged exposure to mass media and runaway capitalism, an instinctive (re)turning to primitive modes of belief and ritual in the hope of rescuing some semblance of meaning from our existence. In other words, an important and timely exploration of everything that’s going on in America and the world right now.
There is an extended super-cut preview of the album available (which forms the record’s first of four ‘movements’), but the first single proper, ‘Rorschach’, came out last month with a video directed by Matthew Thomas Ross (Neighborhood Films). Starring the memory-less protagonist described above, the song explores how our current state of information overload can, paradoxically, lead to an increase in ignorance and confusion. Here, the system is whited out in an entropic blizzard, the overabundance of information causing an austerity of meaning.
“Eyes on the screen.
We have all the information now
but what does it mean?
Reason’s a tease.
Drank up all that hemlock,
here I am just reading the leaves”
Offerings is set for release on the 12th January via Roll Call Records and you can pre-order it now.