Review Summary: Let your life grow strong and sweet to the taste, 'cause the odds are completely insane.
Really, I just want to write a million-word ode to "Persevere", the ninth track on this perfect, devastating, inspiring record. If an emotionally heavier song has ever been penned, please show me the way and give me a lifetime to get over it. Under a reluctant -- almost lethargic -- piano motif, David Le'aupepe sings: "I used to want to be important; now I just wanna be alive, and without fear." Gradually, it's joined by bass, drums, and eventually a triumphant guitar line, which finds the sincerest vocalist in the known universe questioning his lack of faith in God. In truth, it's the only moment in music that has ever made me do the same.
Gang of Youths' second studio album makes me wonder if I ever did like The National that much, after all. Which is to say: what were
all my favourite artists playing at, when this record was waiting to be made all along? The Berninger reference is almost too easy; Le'aupepe sings deeply, and pensively. But there is no confusing this album for a
High Violet; it is orders of magnitude more explicitly ambitious, more musically fluid, more knowingly articulate. It houses the soul & sound of Springsteen, the structural boldness of Titus Andronicus. But it is entirely unmistakable.
Gang of Youths know it, and lean into it with every opportunity. Two tracks break the 7-minute barrier, and a majority thunder past 5. The album is organised into four "acts", separated by string pieces whose names are written in French: "L'imaginaire", "Le symbolique", "Le réel". They divide the movements of a narrative that, broadly, is about learning to appreciate life and take on the days as they come. Le'aupepe's use of imagery evolves accordingly as the record goes on, from oblique metaphors to dream sequences, and finally to the concrete fist-clenching of "Say Yes To Life".
It's a constant tug-of-war between the absurdity of life and the embrace of oblivion. Unabashedly philosophical,
Go Farther In Lightness is almost thesis-like in composition, tone and language. Strings, brass, wailing guitars, spoken-word vignettes: all manner of instrumentation adorns its passages, which are totally unafraid to announce their grandiose intentions. But it balances intellectualism with emotional precision beautifully: "the most dangerous thing is to love", Le'aupepe concludes on "Achilles Come Down". "Did I tell you that I spent most of my sister's wedding stoned?" he muses on the closer.
Go Farther In Lightness is a glorious examination of everything - the light, the dark, the heavy and the weightless, a constant tightrope of believing that a sufficient quantity of honesty can set a person free.
And so, back to "Persevere". "You've got to persevere," probably sounds trite to you if you've never heard this record. But when it's sung at the end of the second chorus, I cannot join in the choir. I choke up. Every single time. See, the song's about how his two friends lost their baby, how he watched in disbelief as they survived the trauma, and how it made him reconsider the way he sees strength and faith. It's one of a dozen stories told across these 75 minutes that form a patchwork of human fragility.
"Stick a finger in their faces when they say you're overblown," Gang of Youths argue on the final cut, just before the song truly takes off into joyous, unbridled outer space. They will say that about this album. F
uck 'em. It makes everything else seem half-assed in comparison.
