In the musical Rent, there happens to be one song that goes almost to painstaking lengths to measure a year. Measuring how one full trip around the sun goes is different for everybody.
For me, an entire year is an album (both photographic and musical, really) that combines as much of what the year had in store. Some of it’s happy, some of it sad, but throughout the year, there is always a soundtrack to each and every second of what my 2018 was like.
For me, one band was featured prominently throughout the entire year. This band are rockstars in their native Australia and are about to take a huge step towards real American fame hopefully soon.
That band was Gang of Youths.
Sometime early last summer, I had been recommended, listened to, and then became completely enamored with their 2017 album Go Farther in Lightness, an effort boasts The Clash-like bounce and Michael Hutchence-esque vocals from frontman Dave Le’aupepe with a dash of the same kind of moral philosophy education employed by NBC’s The Good Place. This was an album that just spoke to me in a volume that I felt was something my ears had been missing. It’s been quite a long time since I’d heard a band that I immediately become attached to like this. When you listen to as many bands and albums as I do, something like this feels akin to a sonic lightning bolt that jolts you from your nose to your toes.
I must confess, I actually was familiar with the work of Gang of Youths before this year, most notably through a masterfully performed cover of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” on Triple J’s Like a Version. 2018 was the year though where their music just completely clicked for me. As someone raised on The Clash, U2, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul Westerberg, this band was extremely the kind of band that slid right into an already well-established record collection.
Go Further in Lightness begins with as Thunder Road-ian and intro as humanly possible on “Fear and Trembling.” When describing the famed opener to Born To Run opening track, Springsteen called the opening piano keys by Roy Bittan “an invitation.” Fear and Trembling features a similar piano line that I’m sure would get an affirmative RSVP from any rock and roll fan out there.
The album also features a quiet piano and vocal driven ballad titled “Persevere,” which is about a friend of the band losing their newborn baby. It’s the kind of song that listened to in the right light can create fissures in the foundation of your heart. Written from front man Dave Le’aupepe’s perspective, the song showcases how some of the most searing pain is that being experienced by close friends in need. The simple yet, all the same, poignant lyric of “It’s okay to be unspeakably lost,” simply broke me when I first heard it.
I was reminded of friends of mine who, like the song’s subjects had lost children during infancy and Le’aupepe’s words just nail that feeling of having to be both a good friend and mustering up the kind of stoicism and solidarity necessary in mourning someone you never had the chance to meet. Where these emotions live is somewhere near the busy, yet, eerily silent intersection of grief and shaken beliefs. It takes the right kind of writer to be able to be able to capture exact feeling without losing the wholeness of such intricate and vivid emotions; Le’aupepe nails it, especially in the recently released and crushingly beautiful MTV Unplugged version.
Personally, the Go Further in Lightness was the exact record to stem a personal tide I swam against with this past summer. In late July, I lost my job in surprising fashion and was in need of a pick-me-up and fast. Once the initial dose of local IPA at the American Airlines terminal at Logan Airport and an ill-advised personal screening of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown wore off, I headed for Chicago to meet up with my girlfriend who was there visiting her family; this of course was a better course of action that sulking around in my apartment listening to excessively too much Neil Young, Bob Dylan, or The National.
As I flew to Illinois to lick my wounds for a week, I serendipitously sat next to a fellow traveler who had been in New England seeing a few shows in nearby Maine. As we flew over the Great Lakes, we struck up a conversation, likely much to the chagrin of the other sky-weary passengers on our flight, about bands we’ve seen and albums we’ve each liked throughout the year up to that point.
I had brought up Gang of Youths and his face immediately lit up. He had said that he had also become a big fan of theirs earlier in the year and was bummed that their Lollapalooza after-show later that same week in the Windy City was cancelled. We exchanged emails and goodbyes at O’Hare International Airport and went our separate ways off into a warm Midwest midsummer night.
Now in the throes of 2019, I feel like I should drop him a line and tell him what it was like seeing Gang of Youths in person in Boston this past December in a crowded Brighton Music Hall. I should relay to him about what the set was like and how Le’aupepe’s stage presence leaps off the stage and gives you the tightest hug and hardest high-five. Not bad for a band that previously came to town and the only people who showed up could be counted on two hands with some fingers to spare.
Gang of Youths owned that room. It was theirs and they weren’t going to take any debate on its ownership during their set. Hearing them start with “Fear and Trembling” opened up like an invitation to a night of philosophical, but positive rock music. As a complete package, the band just works like a well-oiled machine. It was the exact kind of shock to the system I needed. With ears still ringing, it was a warm night even if the thermometer said otherwise.
That night was a fitting end to my musical year: a crowded room with my favorite band of the moment and my best friend right by my side. If I remember anything in 2018, I sincerely hope it’s that night and the moment I saw Gang of Youths become more than just an auditory sensation to me.
If you get the chance, see your favorite band of the moment when you get the chance. Just do it. Moments like that are for the taking; just waiting for you to open the door and walk right into them.
