In spite of its heavy subject matter, Typhoon’s epic fourth LP, Offerings, still manages to be uplifting

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      On the list of topics we do our best to avoid, it’s near the top: what happens when death comes slowly, the inevitable end accompanied by the kind of mental degeneration that turns memories into blurry snapshots? That question provides the leaping-off point for wrapping one’s head around Offerings, the epic fourth album by Oregon-spawned orchestral indie unit Typhoon.

      Over the course of the record’s sprawling 70-plus minutes, which will resonate with anyone who loves the grandeur of Arcade Fire and Okkervil River, singer and main songwriter Kyle Morton paints a devastatingly moving portrait of a man living out his confused dying days. Offerings also turns things around, coming at the story from the perspective of a long-time spouse trying her best to play nurturing caregiver. That sets up a closing suite of songs that dares to wonder what happens right before the lights go out for good, and that suggests it’s not all bad once the final curtain is dropped.

      Speaking volumes about a record that is ambitious lyrically and musically, the talking points don’t stop there. Reached in a tour van that’s making its way to Seattle, Morton is thoughtful and articulate as he discusses an album that draws on both the fictional and the personal.

      “I’ve always been obsessed with this idea of memory, having been mentally incapacitated myself at certain points,” the singer says openly. “Knowing that’s a possibility of happening again, this almost became a survivalist manifesto for what happens when the worst comes. I was interested in this: what kind of memories should I be trying to preserve and keep as I get older? Which ones are really meaningful? But the other aspect of the record is that there’s this time we live in where our experiences are so completely stuffed with stimulus and fragments of information. I was interested in the idea of—if you could strip all that away—what would be the fundamental experiences of one’s life.”

      Offerings can be broken into four parts, starting with the descent into a world where the cognitive order we take for granted during our younger years has given way to completely dizzying chaos. The record kicks off with Morton intoning “Listen. Of all the things that you’re about to lose, this will be the most painful.” From there Typhoon—which is currently out on tour as an eight-piece—eases into the pastoral indie-prog opener, “Wake”, the most devastating line of which might be “My life one brief unbroken loop—goes round and round with nothing left to hold on to.” Desperation truly starts to take hold in the tension-drenched second track, “Rorschach” (“And I’m trying to stay sane—meanwhile, the river of forgetfulness it starts spilling the banks”), and then Morton lays out grim reality in the incandescent follow-up, “Empiricist” (“And you say you’re sorry to the guests at your party/But you can’t help wonder, who is this person you celebrate?”).

      That perspective gradually shifts to the caregiver’s—by the time we get to black-hearted indie-rocker “Remember”, Morton wrings every ounce of drama out of lines like “There’s no future, there’s no lighthouse on the lake/You’re just rambling through endless corridors—a mouse lost in a maze.” But out of the bleakness there’s eventually hope, starting with the string-laden break-of-dawn ballad “Coverings” (“Saw you in a dream before/Standing at my open door/I would wait to watch you go/Follow you out in the cold.”

      Fittingly, given the scope of Offerings, the project can’t be traced to a single event. Morton allows that he was, and continues to be, fascinated by Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, which explains the “asa nisi masa” incantation (a reference to the iconic nonsense phrase in the movie) in both the first and last tracks.

      “The film deals with the crisis of the creative process,” Morton says. “It also has this sort of Proustian element where you’ve got someone trying to recapture bits of his past to almost psychoanalyze himself, which is sort of the project that I’ve embarked on with Offerings. So 8 1/2 seemed very symbiotic with the work that I was doing. And I just loved that ‘asa nisi masa’ bit as an incantation for bringing up lost memories.”

      Offerings was in many ways therapeutic. When the creative process was under way, a relative close to the singer ended up in the hospital. Although Morton is reluctant to get into details, the illness sounds like it was a drawn-out one.

      “I’ve sort of been deflecting a little on this question, and not just for my sake,” he says. “I lost somebody that I loved a lot, and I’m still dealing with that. Our whole family is. So for my family, and this person that we lost—he was a very private man—I don’t really wish to share too much. But I think that, in an abstract way, everyone can relate to losing someone they love. During this loss, I was very focused on the idea that, if life is seen as one long process of loss or of subtraction, what is the last thing that goes? More specifically, with this record, if you’re losing all of your memory, what is the last thing that you’ll be left with, and will it be enough to preserve your humanity?”

      The ultimate triumph of Offerings is that it manages to be uplifting despite the heavy subject matter. It’s not by accident that the final track, “Sleep”, starts as an acoustic 4 a.m. reverie, and then ends with what sounds like a blue-skies after-party, complete with buzzing conversation.

      “On the balance, I don’t know if it was a positive- or a negative-sum game,” Morton offers. “It definitely took a lot out of me to make the record—it was a lot of time spent in the basement studio racking my brain and exhausting my own very modest skills at engineering. But the conclusions that I arrived at were very therapeutic. Finishing a work—or really finishing anything—for me has this great placebo effect. There’s a sense of accomplishment that carries me for a little bit, mentally speaking. I remember the day I actually recorded the last part. It was like, ‘Okay—what’s next? Oh, nothing—that’s it, it’s done.’ It wasn’t even relief that washed over me. It was more a sense of ‘Well, what does this mean now?’ ”

      Typhoon plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Saturday (February 24).

      Comments