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Gang of Youths finds hope after a nightmare

Chicago Tribune - 3/29/2018

March 29--Last year, Gang of Youths released "Go Farther in Lightness" (Mosy/Sony) in its homeland of Australia, an album that has slowly made its way around the world. It's a wave of ambitious rock songs, but its peak moment is one of its quietest, "Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane."

It's a slow-burner in which the narrator confronts the unspeakable. "I'm walking alone through the hospital door/ID their bodies, collapse to the floor," David Le'aupepe sings, only to realize it's just a horrible dream. The chorus becomes more determined as the song winds through its 7 1/2 minutes: "Do not let this thing you got go to waste/ Do not let your heart be dismayed/ It's here by some random disclosure of grace."

Le'aupepe didn't make up this tale of fear and hope. For months he was living it. "Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane" was "born out of some big, screwed-up, recurring dream, which kept getting more intense each time I would have it," the singer says. "It's about being scared I would lose everything that I loved or cared about. It was something deeply repressed, but once I let it out in the song, the dreams stopped."

Even at this early stage in the band's career, it feels like a landmark song. "It's my favorite song we've done because it's about some common shared human experience," Le'aupepe says. "One thing that we all share, no matter what creed or color or age, is that concept of losing something you love. That's a powerful, uniting, binding theme. That dream really messed with me, and the only proper reaction seemed to be to do something simple and direct in addressing that fear."

When heard in the context of the album, the song gains resonance. It's preceded by a brief string interlude that provides a bittersweet setup.

"The whole record was painstakingly put together," Le'aupepe says, "and we were thinking about making those kinds of connections all the way through. I'm classically trained, something I picked up from my dad (while growing up in Sydney). Classical was the only type of music we played in our house, and it always felt like something we (the band) wanted to do, but didn't have the discipline or time. With this one, we had the time to draw a bigger picture of who we are."

The band only scraped the surface of its range on its 2015 debut album, "The Positions." It documented a difficult period in the singer's life during which he struggled with alcoholism and depression and tried to commit suicide. Music helped pull him out with the help of his bandmates -- bassist Max Dunn, keyboardist Jung Kim, guitarist Joji Malani and drummer Donnie Borzestowski. They took their time working on the follow-up, a sprawling 75-minute release that went to No. 1 on the Australian charts and opened up new avenues in America, including a series of acclaimed shows a few weeks ago at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, and a national tour that includes a stop at Subterranean on Friday.

"It was pretty dismal for us back then," La'aupepe says of the band's first album. "We were making fairly anonymous indie-rock at a time when it's hard for rock bands in general to have meaning in the culture. It's easy to ignore us -- radio sure has. But we thought if we pour our hearts into this, we inherently trusted people to care. Part of me thinks we don't deserve this position. We're given this platform, talking to impressionable people. It's an entitled, strange place to be ..."

Le'aupepe's voice trails off, and his hesitance provides some insight into the anxieties that go into his songs. "I mean, I wake up next to my wife some mornings, and I realize I don't really know what I'm doing. I want to be an example of someone who didn't mess up their life, though the opportunity was there. So I didn't want to squander the gift of being able to write songs again, after going through a long lost period. I was in a relatively bad place for a while, and then came out the other side to make music with my best friends in the world. I felt rejuvenated."

He says the band was critical to his renewal. "Making this record was like rehab in a way. The music reflects not just me, but what we do as a band. There's a lot of ebb and flow, and that had to be in the music, all these five-, six- and seven-minute songs."

For some, Gang of Youths might be a bit much, a throwback to a time when bands believed your life really could be saved by rock 'n' roll, and wrote big -- some would say "bloated" -- songs to match. But La'aupepe isn't making any apologies.

"The whole world seems to have turned upside down, and music can be an important way to deal with it," he says. "It was a healing thing for me. We want to make the kind of music that can do for people what great music, great albums did for us when we were growing up. I want to be part of that tradition."

Greg Kot cohosts "Sound Opinions" at 8 p.m. Friday and 2 and 11 p.m. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

greg@gregkot.com

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When: 8:30 p.m. Friday.

Where: Subterranean, 2011 W. North Ave.

Tickets: $15; www.subt.net

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