Review Summary: We’re the moth We’re the flame
Death
sucks. Death represents the all-encompassing finiteness of our being, the reason for our mortality and anguish. Because of death the individual can never achieve perfection, for perfect beings are immortal and infinite; because of death all of us will one day have to come to terms with our own limitations, and that is a heck of a lot of suffering. Worst of all, death is
natural. As natural as taking a piss or breathing in air; it is inescapable and thrust upon our being the second we breathe our first breath of air and lingers on till we take in our last. Death is the shady cloak-wearing son of a bitch lurking in the background with a bloody scythe in one hand and a giant pocket watch in the other eagerly waiting to appear and say the lines "Your time is up!" And that makes death ***ing
terrifying.
White Lighter is an album about death. Specifically it derives as inspiration the painfully crucial moments of singer Kyle Morton's life such as the memory of him contracting Lyme disease as a kid in "The Lake," the anguished regrets of "Hunger and Thirst" and the intimate innocence spent with his father in the early part of "Artificial Light." Reading the lyrics to
White Lighter can be an uncomfortable experience, since no healthy living individual ever
truly believes he is going to die and yet it can also be a sobering one, given that Morton is actually himself in the thick of dying. His own personal struggle with Lyme disease and with successive organ transplants and organ failures adds an unfortunate shade of weighty credibility to his song-writing, and Morton seems all too aware of his own fate, noting that
My eyes are open in "Artificial Light." Later on in the same song he would exclaim with reference to it's title that
this is why we have lovers and why we have fighters / this is why the arms race, the particle colliders. He recognizes the overwhelming human need for purpose and direction in order to stave off the finiteness of our mortality, how it is contrived and created, how the meaning of our entire existence ultimately proves to be artificial; and he is honest enough too to admit his own shortcomings with the following line
mine is a humble flame just a little white lighter.
White Lighter thus appears to be quite the gloomy prospect, and yet ironically it sounds nothing like it. The size of the 10+ member band complete with strings, horns, and a second drum set makes Typhoon sound like a mini orchestra. And the grandiose, majestic and glorious manner in which the band chooses to soundtrack the topic of death perhaps best reflects their view of it; that coupled with anguish and despair we get blazing trumpets and shouting vocals, that with suffering and ruin we get riveting crescendos and swooning violins, that their music, ultimately, proves to be a resounding
triumph in the very face of death.
White Lighter is therefore an open acceptance and acknowledgement of the fragility of life and simultaneously a bold rebellion against a submission to death, it is a rallying call-to-arms to find consolation in every defeat, to find comfort in the love of our family and to find peace among the disturbances of turbulence.
I will be good though my body be broken sings Morton towards the end of "Common Sentiments" with blaring horns and crashing cymbals in the background,
We are alone in this together shouts the gang vocals from the song "Morton's Fork;" there is definitely tragedy and misery in a world that the individual can only perceive alone but then again, as Typhoon so wonderfully points out, we still have
hope, and more importantly,
each other.
White Lighter, finally, is 2013's most accurate portrayal of death and also its most rebellious. It is the humanistic representation of what death truly is: an absurdity, a distortion, a messy affair riddled with unanswered questions and strife with disease. It captures beautifully the contrast and contradiction of the most essential point of death; that it isn't the finishing line at the end of life, it is the
driving force behind it. This therefore means that every living action is predicated one way or another on death, and Morton is not excluded from this as he ponders whether to start a family in "Young Fathers," as he laments the disowning of his family in "The Lake," and as he makes the choice between self and self-sacrifice in "Morton's Fork." Perhaps with regards to this it would be easier to attempt an interpretation of the album's cover art; that we are individually drawn and underlined by death like how moths are drawn to a flame, that the redness marks the the tragedy and impossibility of our inescapable fate and that finally, like a brilliant white light the background signifies and contains within it the many different shades and colors of what
White Lighter - to borrow from Moses Kim's wonderful review - is actually about
:
life itself.
