I've Been Feeling Sinister: Indie Pop's Bizarre Affair with Existentialism

Is this you?

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

-Albert Camus, The Stranger

“There’s a tombstone right in front of you and everyone I know”

-Vampire Weekend, “Don’t Lie”

This article primarily exists to explore one of popular music’s most disturbing oxymorons. The moniker "indie-pop" speaks far more to the public consciousness than a literal reading of two impossibly ambiguous words shoved together. Sweet, earnest, cute, pretty, it’s music for modern teenagers to fall in love with. It may be a bit off-color, a bit off-key, but it never strays far from that pop anchor. It’s music to tap your foot to, music to smile to, music to feel good about. The question is, then, why is some of the most life-affirming, inspiring music so depressing in content. More specifically, why does indie pop seem so especially fixated on death. 

Top 50 Albums Of 2013: End-Of-The-Year List of Rainbows and Sunshine

Because I had to find a way to fit in a Pentatonix reference.

Over the past twelve months, I finished high school, questioned (and then came back around to) my faith, wrote a lot of angsty teen poetry, took too many selfies, and met a lot of great people. That aside, I also lost a good deal of my hearing listening to all of the fabulous music that came out in 2013. To put it this way: the albums on this list alone run for a combined length of 36 hours, give or take a few minutes. I've listened to most of them a good three or four times, and some of the ones near the top of this list I've heard upwards of ten times. For the sake of convenience, let's assume I listened to each of these about five times, making for a total listening time of 180 hours for only the 50 albums below. Then consider that this isn't even a third of the music I've heard this year when you count all of the other albums, EPs, and singles from 2013. I would estimate I spent about 600 hours (or 25 days) listening to music this year, which is 6.85% of the entire year--an even larger proportion when you exclude the time I spent asleep. It's no surprise that when I look back on 2013, music will be an enormous part of my memories.

But even when I'm old and deaf in one ear, I won't regret a moment of the time I spent here: MuzikDizcovery has become a home for me, not just for the fantastic community of staff members but for every single one of you who read, listen and (as our site's name suggests) discover. You make this one of the best places for a music lover to be.

Clicking on an album title will take you to an album stream or, failing that, a stream of a single. Onwards!

Top Albums, Shows and Songs of 2013

When I’m old, fat and (hopefully) happy, I will probably look back at 2013 as a pivotal blip in my life, where I lost one of the most important things to me—something I had been planning my entire adult existence around for some eight years—and was suddenly forced to forge a new path on a new map. Opposite directions, graduation, crumbling, cynicism, and the renouncing of my faith in what I thought was my home. Yes, more downs than ups this time around, but if everything was perfect, I’d never feel anything (the balance will allow). To my beautiful lady, supportive family and the following bands, albums and shows that consistently found a way to lift me up from wherever I had fallen this year, I am forever thankful.

Album Review: Typhoon - White Lighter

Album Rating: A+

“And everybody knows this is the end / It's now a fashionable woe in a part of conversation.”

So it goes. That’s just one of many resigned stanzas on the latest effort from Oregon-based folk collective Typhoon. There isn’t a better band to deliver the sentiment, either; death has been as prominent in its discography as eggs and bacon ever since the troupe first came to be eight years ago. Yet for all the grave talk, White Lighter positively brims with life and, yes, light. It’s a stunning effort from a stunning band, as Typhoon expands its humble existential ruminations into a bold theatrical statement and one of the best albums of the year.

There’s two big dynamics at play on White Lighter: the first a reflection on death, typical for Typhoon; the second, a bit newer for the band, what 20th century philosopher Victor Frankl would have called a “tragic optimism” in the face of mortality. Of course, this is less a binary than a spectrum, all of which gets explored in detail here. The climax of late-album cut “Hunger & Thirst,” where lead vocalist Kyle Morton begins by listing the different things he could have been, is one example. “I could have been a gold digger, I could have been a gun slinger, I could have been a little bigger...” he sings as the mélange of guitar, strings, and horns behind him stops for half a heartbeat—and in one big swoop, his voice rises to a yowl and the instruments erupt into a blast of sweet summer rain. “But what I am is a silence,” he concludes in a suddenly hushed tone, and that brief spark of catharsis makes way for a prolonged instrumental passage, resolution lurking only in the fog of trumpets floating over the ending.

Jukebox: Typhoon - "Young Fathers"

Oregon-based folk supergroup Typhoon often concerns itself with the passage of time, a theme that it continues to take in haunting, emotional directions with its latest single, "Young Fathers." As always, the band shows off its sun-kissed charm with soft ooohs, a hearty serving of choral camaraderie, and rich, jovial instrumentation (including horns, harmonica, lounge guitar, and maybe even a touch of trip-hop). For such a joyful display, though, the song's twistier than a strawberry Twizzler: a grizzled Spiderman, it swings from cobweb to cobweb picking at the pictures of a parent/child relationship long gone. Long-time listeners will know, however, that this is hardly music for moping, as Typhoon approaches this introspection with irresistible energy and a sincere, untarnished sense of wonder.

Sometimes, I worry that becoming an adult will mean letting go of happiness and hope and barren love, all those matters of the heart that we're warned will shrivel in the glare of the world. Why I love Typhoon--and why "Young Fathers" moves me so--is because it always reminds me that sometimes when you grow up, your heart grows a little bit too.



Typhoon's upcoming LP White Lighter is out August 20 on Roll Call Records.