album review: 'angel in realtime' by gang of youths

One thing about being a music critic in a space where parasocial relationships are cultivated is that you get a lot of folks recommending acts to you saying ‘oh, this is so up your alley’ or ‘you like this, so you’ll definitely like this’. And taking all of this at face value, I put this outside of your standard review request because it comes built with the assumption that they know enough to find something you might like - and when you have a catalog of review content as extensive as mine, it’s worth at least the assumption that they might have found something.

And yet I have to be honest, I’m more sensitive to this sort of thing than most, in that I’m nearly always skeptical whenever folks say this, not in a ‘you can’t possibly know me’ sort of thing but because I’ve been down this road so many times before. Sometimes it comes with folks recommending stuff they like so much that they have to assume a critic they like would like it too, sometimes it comes with just assumptions of genre - I got a lot of folks requesting midwestern emo just because I loved Spanish Love Songs, which is all the more disappointing when you hear so many acts fall short and the novelty starts slipping away. And maybe some of it comes with having to actually interact with people in real life and that even if I know their specific tastes and would love to recommend stuff, the majority of folks will never care to delve deeper and I’ve been around way too many disinterested shrugs by folks who aren’t as passionate to share the experience… and while I get that, it really kind of sucks when you think you found something they’d love, which is why despite what I do online, unless the conversation is already going, I rarely bring up music in person, even if I might desperately want to.

All this is preamble to saying that when folks starting saying the Australian indie rock act Gang Of Youths was up my radar, I was very skeptical, and I have been for years. Granted, they haven’t put out an album since 2017 so I haven’t seen a lot of requests about them come up on my radar outside of a few excited ones that year, but they wound up on my schedule and… yeah, this is one of those cases where folks may have been right, because I took to Gang of Youths nearly immediately, first for their Bleachers-meets-Frank-Turner Springsteen arena rock worship of their debut but even moreso when they pulled from U2, The National, and a little Arcade Fire and Japandroids for their extravagant and magnificent 2017 album Go Farther In Lightness. It’s the sort of album that has me absolutely kicking myself that I didn’t cover it properly five years ago, the earnest firepower, optimism, and go for broke power that might tilt towards silliness but is theatrical enough to make it all work - in other words, even if it’s been five years and founding member Joji Malani was leaving, replaced by Tom Hobden who previously toured with Mumford & sons… look, even if it was utterly unrealistic to expect something to match Go Farther In Lightness, this is a time where I could use some massive, anthemic indie rock… so what did we get?

Well, there’s a lot I’m going to try and say about this album, because while you can trace this band’s lineage and influences pretty thoroughly, I’m not sure there are many adequate descriptions for this album. For the second time this year after Black Country, New Road we have an album that could double as the stage musical of itself and feels all the more glorious for it, the closest thing we’ve had to a band mirroring U2’s arc from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby but also with an even wider and more textured sonic foundation and never compromising its swells of heartfelt earnestness… and while I don’t think it’s precisely better than Go Farther In Lightness, I think this could easily be among one of the best albums of 2022.

Now unfortunately I have to qualify that immediately with the statement that Gang of Youths is a band that carries some of its own baggage and while they might be my thing, I absolutely get why someone would find them way too much to handle. All of their songs and projects run a little longer than they should where you can argue they’re straining to burst at every angle, a band with stadium-sized ambitions that can make them difficult to take seriously by certain demographics, especially when the lyrics can feel a bit too broadly sketched or self-important for their own good - basically, even despite the very real subject matter grounding this album, if you ran out of patience with U2 in their heyday, it’ll probably be the case with Gang Of Youths as well. Hell, even as someone who now wants to call himself a fan, Gang of Youths albums are the furthest thing from streamlined and can be a lot to take in outside of individual songs - and even then, on this album there’s only one of them that runs less than four minutes! And since Gang of Youths is the sort of band that goes for broke consistently with huge hooks and swells of strings and massive crescendos, it can feel like an exhausting, emotionally draining listen - but on the flipside, I’m not sure how you make an album with these emotional stakes and framing that’s damn near global and you don’t embrace scale like this does. I drew a comparison to Achtung Baby and like that album, Gang Of Youths is diversifying their sound, not just leaning into the increasingly elaborate chamber pop that coloured their last album, but also drawing on elements of Pacific islander music from the Maori and Pasifika people, not just in samples but also in the percussion. And amazingly, it works effectively - one of my many issues with Achtung Baby and indeed a lot of the ‘world music’ tendencies of the late 80s and early 90s is that they felt more like a gimmick, or a tourist sampling textures without any serious cultural exchange, so it got commodified very quickly; and not only does frontman Dave Le’aupepe manage to make the blend feel organic, he even directly comments on how that can happen within art and music on ‘returner’!

Now that’s not to say it always works - it’s hard to escape a comparison to Go Farther In Lightness simply for how effectively that album blasts away with its arena rock ambitions, but from a production standpoint angel in realtime is cleaner, with more indie pop tendencies like the bright acoustics and handclaps and occasional splash of synthesized vocals on “in the wake of your leave” to bounce off ethereal keyboards, jangling acoustics and banjo, and of course the swells of strings and horns that are key to making the album feel so huge. And at least for me, even if Go Farther In Lightness is somehow longer, the rougher rock side with the more robust low-end and more direct hooks gives it more momentum, and while Le’aupepe is a really good singer, I’m not sure his falsetto is always strong enough to carry even some of the swell he tries here. But those are nitpicks - for the most part I was absolutely floored by how strikingly rich and well-balanced Gang Of Youths’ production is, especially in the percussion. The grooves have always been an underrated element to Gang of Youths’ arsenal with Max Dunn on bass, but now with the drums having to balance not just more conventional rock progressions but also the Maori-inspired passages and a considerable infusion of drum’n’bass and breakbeat - likely inspired by taking up residence in the UK - it’s legit stunning now just how balanced they are, but also how much crisp texture and punch they still have to keep up the tempos. But beyond that there are so many instrumental moments I have to highlight that still blow me away: the gorgeous strings swell on the bridge of “you in everything” and the hook of “the man himself”, the killer bass smashing into the choppy acoustics of “the angel of 8th avenue”, the sneering trashy barroom elegance of “returner”, the horns splashing through The National-esque “unison”, the quaking, yearning sadness of the hook of “spirit boy”, the spare but textured piano ballads of “brothers” and “hand of god” that serve as some very welcome breathers, and especially how it all culminates on the closer “goal of the century”. And then there's “the kingdom is within you”, which between the driving pianos, surges of guitar in the second verse, and strings on the bridge might be one of the best songs of 2022 - it's rare that a single track makes me immediately go back and listen to it five more times after hearing it once, we're talking songs like “Rain In Soho” that pull that off, and this absolutely is one, the sort of album centerpiece with an undeniable hook that is worth the entire album on its own!

But for all of this extravagance, if the writing isn’t there, I’m not going to get onboard, so let’s talk content. Going back briefly to Achtung Baby, a deflection that U2 embraced on that album and throughout the 90s was irony, where they could play to the grand pretentious ambitions but also keep things somewhat at arm’s length, taking the piss out of all of it. Now this was something I didn’t care for, given that the ironic show of deflection can feel increasingly hollow, an empty disavowal that doesn’t really change emotionality or material affect - take notes, Gen Z, some of us see right through this as you bring it back - and that’s one reason I find this album so impactful… because despite the stylistic change, the earnestness is still here. On the surface, this album is a reckoning with and a commemoration of Dave Le’aupepe’s late father, who passed away in 2018 - he’s a figure who has loomed large over album like Go Farther In Lightness, reportedly inspiring the balance between the rock intensity and lush, beautiful arranged elements, and you can tell Le’aupepe took his loss hard, not just forcing him to reckon with his own mortality - specifically a suicide attempt he describes on ‘forbearance’ - and the loved ones that he dearly cares about, specifically his wife… but also with years of distance, how life has just continued on, where capturing atomized moments feels inadequate, even if they induce incredibly powerful emotions - the one-two closer of ‘hand of god’ and ‘goal of the century’ referencing Diego Maradona’s hand goal against England in 1986 captures this incredibly well, a legendary football moment wrought with complications. It’s one reason I’m more forgiving of how callous ‘returner’ feels, a existential crisis where in the throes of trying to work through these emotions in art that he must then sell and balance as a career to make money it starts to feel like some sick joke, the one place there is some sliver of ironic deflection.

But things get messy when we start getting a more complicated picture of this father figure, not just everything that Le’aupepe himself couldn’t express but also discovering that his father had fathered and abandoned a few other children around the world that he only comes to discover years later, which leads to the stripped down piano ballad ‘brothers’ where he has contextualize or even forgive him. Now discovering the human failings of your parents may have been enough to deepen this album, but Le’aupepe then goes further, highlighting the racial context in not just connecting to his Samoan and Maori heritage and the discrimination his father faced which may have spurred those questionable decisions to chase a better life - and at what cost - but also how that has spilled over into his own experience, which adds further tangles of frustration and anger. And while you can try to compartmentalize some of this within your life and especially art, the messy truth is that time as we experience it doesn’t work like that - a continuous flow within systems outside of your direct control, where you might be stuck trying to cling to moments to contextualize a bigger world, but people and the world are ever changing, and as much as you want to control that arc… ultimately you have to learn how to live within in it, work with what you can change. For an act that strives to be so huge, it’s a remarkable thing to have the capacity and humility to look in wonderment at a world even bigger, full of the unknown, which is something U2 could sometimes miss, and the fact that the human drama doesn’t get lost in the swell feels like a testament to how you can make those huge emotions still feel real.

And at the end of the day… I don’t know if this album is going to get the acclaim or reception it should. You could argue Gang of Youths play way closer to a early-to-mid-2010s approach to earnestness and sincerity that doesn’t seem to have the same direct resonance for the next generation who is returning behind the shields of irony; it happened between the 80s and the 90s, and it’s a big reason that certain acts changed with the times. On the flip side, that influence from The National targeting an older demographic, and the fact that what a lot of folks embrace ironically eventually swings around to unironic appreciation might give Gang Of Youths more staying power, and I genuinely hope they get it, because this is something special. Gorgeous production, writing that can swing for the fences but also deliver layered complexity, a band that can be heartbreakingly earnest but still showcase a range of emotionality, and some of the best hooks I’ve heard in 2022. This is the album to beat this year thus far, folks, and you likely haven’t heard much of them - but if you weren’t lucky enough to get onboard with Go Farther In Lightness, this is a prime opportunity to find something special. Please, make it in realtime, check this out!