Angel in Realtime

#4 – Angel in Realtime by Gang of Youths

Thanks to Michael Washburn for this one! I connected with Michael via my Tom Petty podcast as he wrote a fantastic book about the album Southern Accents and the themes Tom did and didn’t explore on the record. It’s a truly excellent piece of critical writing and Michael is a ravenously articulate and thoughtful fella. 

I’d never heard of Gang of Youths and I immediately liked the band name. They’re a five piece alt rock band from Australia and have a multicultural makeup within the lineup; Max Dunn on bass guitar, backing vocals and keyboards, Jung Kim on keyboards, piano, and lead guitar, David Le’aupepe on lead vocals, rhythm guitar, and piano, Donnie Borzestowski on drums and backing vocals, and Tom Hobden on violin, rhythm guitar and keyboards. Like Midnight Marauders, I gave this one two full listens before writing down these thoughts as I felt like I needed more time to really figure out how I felt about the album. 

After the first listen, it was very obvious that this was a very personal album for whoever wrote the lyrics, so I wanted to get a handle on what the story behind the record was. So, from Wikipedia; “Written over the four years following the death of frontman David Le’aupepe’s father, the album lyrically focuses on the emotions that arise from mourning, coming to terms with loss, and discovering family identity in the Pacific Islands. It consistently uses vocal and instrumental samples from Indigenous musicians collected by explorer David Fanshawe, marking a significant sonic departure from their previous album, Go Farther in Lightness”. Straight away, that made a difference to how I listened to the album the second time, because I had that context. I don’t always love having that context when I’m listening to a new record because I think that a set of songs should speak for themselves to a large degree and having the backstory should be able to add emotional weight or historical information for where a band or an artist was at the time they wrote it; after all, every album is a snapshot in time. I would say that my appreciation of the album definitely increased during the second listen through. I would also mention that topics like this that are deeply introspective, specific, and directly address lyrically can sometimes wear on me. Sometimes, when an artist is picking away at their emotional scabs, I find it can cross the self-indulgence line and turn me off. There are definitely many exceptions to this and it comes down to whether the songs are any good. 

Now, I would say that if I wasn’t going through this exercise of listening to albums and writing down these thoughts, I’m not sure I’d have made it past the first song on the record. And that’s not because it isn’t good, but it’s not what I’d ordinarily seek out. If I compare them somewhat to Coldplay, I don’t mean that as an insult, but I don’t think it’s unkind or miles off the mark either. There’s a very slick production style and very “big” arrangements, with layers of strings, synths and guitars throughout most of the album. Early in my first listen through, I also had a very Coldplay sense of “I could happily listen to a song or two, but then I’m ready for something else”, but this record definitely benefits from the context I mentioned and that second listen. 

OK, let me start off with the negatives. David Le’aupepe is an excellent singer and has a really interesting, soulful voice, but I find that throughout the album, I really wanted to hear what he sounds like when he just lets rip. I recognize that this album is a specific thing and that maybe he couldn’t find spaces to add in a towering, powerful vocal, but he stays in his low to mid register for almost the entire record, so I sometimes wish there was a little more dynamism in the vocal. Again though, this guy is a very good technical and emotive vocalist so this is less a criticism and more a personal preference thing. The second main thing that I struggled with during the first listen, much less so in the second, but I still feel a lingering sense of; I sometimes wish there was less going on. When you have such extraordinary lyrics and such a focused, personal vocal, I think you could make a little more room for everything to breath. At times, the mixes feel like they’re a little too densely packed. Now, credit to the producers, because everything is still clear and distinct, I just found that, sometimes, I wished there was just a little less happening. My last thought on the negative side is that I think several tracks and the album as a whole could have benefited by some judicious editing. I wonder if that will change over time as I listen to this again, because I’m not an impatient listener. I like songs that brew and develop and even meander sometimes. As long as there’s development or interesting melodic or percussive elements, I can stand a bit of longer material, but there’s definitely a sense for me that this album could have ten minutes shaved off it and it would be more impactful. 

Now, onto the positives. I’ve already mentioned that I think David Le’aupepe has a very, very good voice. But he’s also an exceptional lyricist. This album drew me in lyrically even as I was unsure about how much I liked it musically, but the more you listen and if you take some time to read the lyrics to these songs, Le’aupepe blends a traditional folky/singer-songwriter approach with a more contemporary feel. There’s profanity on this record but it never feels gratuitous or cheap. Instead it lends the work an authenticity of voice in its conversational/confessional delivery. As someone who really enjoys well-crafted lyrics, rhyme schemes and metric flow, everything about the way this guy puts together his stories and ideas appeals to me. The band are also very clearly excellent musicians. There are no real virtuosic pyrotechnics on the album. No one single “holy shit!” moment, but this is an album that is meant to describe a fraught emotional journey, not rip your face off and leave you wondering what the hell just happened. So in that regard, the music is constructed very precisely to maintain and oscillate that emotion throughout the album. There are real drum parts mixed with programmed, or triggered beats that I think are very well done and add a little tempo to proceedings here and there, giving the album a lift when it needs it. I would maybe add in that my comment about length would be a caveat here in that I think there are a few times where this doesn’t happen and I was waiting for a song to take a different direction that it never did, but I can’t criticize the execution of what I believe the band was going for. On a last positive note, and this is the most important note; something about this album drew me to want to learn more. I knew I was going to give it a second listen and not rely on my first impressions. And having now heard it a second time, I know there will be a fourth and I think this is likely going to be an album that finds its way into my rotation for while I’m out walking or running. 

I talked about a lack of true “moments” within songs on the album and by this I mean a fantastic bridge section, or an interesting turnaround or breakdown, or something of that nature. Things, for the most part, stay on fairly obvious rails and you can see where the train is going for the majority of the time. But the album itself has a sledgehammer moment when the story underpinning the whole project is revealed in very stark, very direct terms. The ninth track on the record, Brothers, is absolutely sublime and is easily my favourite track on the album. The band strips away all the dense layers of instrumentation so that David Le’aupepe can share the bombshell revelation about his father; that he had other children and his ancestry was not what he’d always told David it was. The structure of the song is incredibly simple with a AAB repeating verse, verse, chorus pattern. “We thought that he was only half-Samoan, that his mother was a German Jew. But I went and found his birth certificate and he lied about that too” Le’aupepe shares in the first chorus, before going to spend each subsequent section talking about a different sibling; his sister (who sings better than him), and his two brothers, Wesley and Matthew. In the last stanza, he reflects on his father’s reasons for lying to his children, he doesn’t seem to have arrived at any point of “closure”, maybe just an acceptance that this wound will stay open longer than he’d like. It’s a superb, weighty song that floats along vocally over the toy-piano production decision which lends a naivety and delicacy to an already powerful song. Bravo. 

From the brief research I did into the band, I believe this might be a little bit of a sonic departure for them so I’ll probably end up listening to their first record to see how they sounded. Angel in Realtime is a very well-written and performed album and I think it’s one that’s going to interest me for a while. I’m not sure yet if I’d pick it up on vinyl, but I definitely wouldn’t rule it out. I don’t have anything really like this in my collection, so it could be one that finds its way in there at some point. So that means my “rating” for the album is a 4/5 at this point. 

The next album I’ll be listening to is by another artist I’ve never heard and I’m not 100% sure how to pronounce; Ryo Fukui. The album is Scenery and was given to me by fellow vinyl nerd Brett Hagan!