offerings

If you don't laugh at yourself, you should try it. You can start by doing it in private; no one has to see it. Maybe no one wants to hear it because the laughing you're going to do at yourself may sound like you're some sort of insane person, but hey, you laugh at you.

I laugh at myself because I keep thinking "oh, I just found this on bandcamp. I've never heard of it before. It's just something random that popped into the 'new arrivals' tab and I checked out a track and I really liked it." I suppose that's what I get for thinking.

No, as it turns out Spotify has been trying to get me into this weeks band, TYPHOON, and their new release Offerings for quite a while now. First it was just the teaser track "Rorschach." Later it was a mix of the first four tracks from the album - all twenty-one minutes of them. I suppose it worked, I preordered Offerings on bandcamp and started listening to it Friday afternoon.

I'll fully admit that I haven't been able to spend as much time with this album over the weekend as I'd like before writing a review, but here goes anyway. Offerings is 70 minutes of so much to take in and think about. It starts off with the spoken line "Listen - of all the things that you are about to lose, this will be the most painful." Yep, that's dark, but it's the story of a man losing his memory and in that, himself. I'm going to tell you that for the first few listens, try not to focus on that.

What I'm going to tell you is to focus on what an eleven member band can do. Bandleader Kyle Morton and Co. swing for the fences with this album. I say that because I took a few brief moments to check out their past albums, and this one is not just longer, it's bigger sonically, it's more ambitious lyrically, and it's their chance to put out an album that people will be talking about for years to come.

These tracks are at times long and take great and interesting twists. They are at times like a version of Arcade Fire on tracks like "Empiricist" that isn't hampered with hefting Win Butler's massive ego/persona. They can also take a track like "Rorschach" and make a band like The New Pornographers very jealous that they didn't do it first. 

As the album progresses it gets more breathy and more acoustic. It's intended to be in four parts after all: "Floodplains," "Flood," "Reckoning," and "Afterparty." There isn't any demarkation on the tracks I have, and all I could find out was that those first four tracks they teased me with comprise the movement "Floodplains." But you really don't need to have them broken up for you. You can feel it out and put them exactly where you want.

There's a lot to digest here, so maybe it's smart that this album is out two weeks into the year. We're all going to need that much time to listen and revisit before the many levels of beauty make themselves fully known.

Recommended Tracks: "Rorschach," "Empiricist," "Remember," "Beachtowel," "Coverings," "Bergeron"