Gang Of Youths

★★ Angel In Realtime WARNER. CD/DL/LP

Aussie transplant five-piece overcook things at their Hackney studio.

Massive back in their native Sydney, Australia, Gang Of Youths moved to Angel, north London in 2017. With its sampled use of Pacific Island choir recordings that the English musicologist David Fanshawe feared would be lost to colonialism, the band’s dense, synthheavy third album has an awful lot going on. Largely concerned with the passing of their part-Samoan frontman David Le’aupepe’s father Teleso, and part-coloured by the Christian megachurch milieu in which Gang Of Youths was formed, the record’s wellmeaning earnestness is a little overwhelming, but it’s the stuffed-crust arrangements that really grate, everything happening at once, and often for too long. Nine songs in, Brothers, just piano and vocal, disinters one of the perfectly decent compositions that are bricked-in elsewhere, Le’aupepe singing movingly of the brothers he never knew he had until his father’s passing.