And I think I just kept passing sort of weird, strange reminders of my father, even good things that I hadn’t been familiar with before. I understand this is the first song you wrote for the album, while you were in Wellington, New Zealand searching for your brothers?ĭAVE LE’AUPEPE: I believe it was the first song that I completed, but I was working on a bunch of other ones that just kind of weren’t fucking hitting the mark, I think, lyrically. You really ought to listen to it, ideally while reading my interview with Le’aupepe below. It makes me feel like a kid discovering big-tent rock music all over again, even as it delves into subjects that can only be truly grasped with the passage of years. The album is a breathtaking piece of work. Put simply, this is the closest thing to classic U2 I can imagine existing in 2022 - yet that comparison undersells what a singular sound and feeling angel in realtime. In a phone call last week, Le’aupepe cited the influence of Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, David Gray, Steve Reich, Hillsong worship music, and Accelera Deck - an obscure Alabama electronic producer he discovered through his friendship with Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew - and you can hear it all in these songs.
Another single, “tend the garden,” somehow pulls off its goal of melding an Avalanches-worthy beat with Marvin Gaye-inspired psychedelic soul. Early single “the man himself” matches breakbeats with old field recordings of Pacific islander hymns, yet it’s powered by the same hearty passion and anthemic sweep that made Gang Of Youths such a big deal in their native country. Think the National with much of the ennui replaced by starry-eyed wonder, Arcade Fire but lighter on their feet, the 1975 if they were just as heady and ambitious but approximately 50% less online. Gang Of Youths translated this phase of upheaval and epiphany into some of the most vivid, tender, ecstatically alive rock music in recent memory. Traveling to his ancestral homeland and meeting his secret family was a revelatory experience, one that transformed his state of mind as he considers the prospect of parenthood himself. For Le’aupepe, the news inflamed an already complicated emotional state, undermining the heroic stature he’d always afforded his dad but also helping him connect with a side of himself that had always felt distant and off-limits. Le’aupepe and his wife traveled from London to follow those breadcrumbs and made a stunning discovery: His father had abandoned two sons and disappeared to Australia in the 1970s, leaving everyone back home to assume he was dead. He’d always been guarded about the life he lived in Samoa and New Zealand before settling in Sydney and starting a family, and on his deathbed, he hinted that there were secrets to be discovered in Polynesia. In 2018, Gang Of Youths frontman Dave Le’aupepe’s father died of cancer. People throw around the word “cinematic” a lot when discussing music, but rarely has an album played out so much like a movie, from its sprawling mythology to its steep emotional stakes. In another sense, no one has ever made an album quite like Gang Of Youths LP3: a story about grief, family, indigenous identity, and a father’s secret life, sewn together from countless musical, emotional, and philosophical threads.
anymore: earnest arena rock with an indie spirit, artfully conceived but populist as hell. In one sense, bands do not make albums like angel in realtime.
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