SEVERE WEATHER WARNING: TYPHOON TO HIT WASHINGTON, DC

The forecast indicates that indie rock band, Typhoon, will be heading South towards the streets of Washington, DC at the 9:30 Club on Monday, May 2nd.

The eye of the storm began to take shape in high school, when Kyle Morton gathered his longtime childhood friends – Toby Tanabe and Casey O’Brien to start up a band. Following their graduation in 2005, the group soaked up the surrounding Salem, OR house-band talent, enough to forge their own full-fledged “Typhoon” in Portland.

Though following typical anecdotal origins, Typhoon isn’t your typical indie rock band. Led by Kyle, the band consists of your base lead singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer, but is also accompanied by a whole micro-orchestra of musicians playing a host of instruments from the cello to the accordion. Members come and go, filling a capacity of up to fourteen members in its past (does that qualify a category 5??), but the band manages to maintain an organic sense of family and friendship in production and on stage.

Kyle explores a variety of themes in the band’s discography, much tied to his relationship with memory and the loss of his childhood to lyme disease. Moreover, a tribe-like connection between band members is felt through the playfulness of their live shows, interviews, and in the way their unique instruments uplift Kyle’s outpour of sorrowful lyrics and harmonies.

Their newest album, “Sympathetic Magic” was released in January 2021. Similar to a lot of artists who released music in 2021, Morton spent a lot of his 2020 year writing songs for the album as he was stuck at home during the quarantine. The name Sympathetic Magic comes from Morton’s feelings about the pandemic. He aims to represent the feeling of being human in challenging times and the sympathy we feel for each other as we navigate our own lives, and as our lives cross the paths of others. If the term “butterfly effect” needed to have a song behind it, it would have to be the ethereal, warm and golden single Empire Builder.

Near the end of 2020, Typhoon began to produce the music Kyle wrote; however, it was a complicated process because the band is so large. People had to record in shifts, or in their own homes. Many songs on the albums utilize so many different beautiful sounds from a variety of instruments, real and electronic. Each song on the album sounds like its own little world full of sounds that you want to analyze on their own.

Listening to the album all the way through takes you on a journey where at times you feel like you are on top of the world as the music builds up, and then more mellow when the music crashes. At other times, you’ll feel calmer and at peace when the “ups” and “downs” come to a crossroads to create the peaceful sound that makes up most of the album.

Don’t hesitate to check them out, and if you want to be part of a real (sympathetic) magical experience and see if the band’s sound lives up to its death-affirming name then you can get tickets