"I can't stop mourning, it's like hearing cancer spreading," singer and bassist Julie DeLano sings. "It's like hope is a fairy tale and so are the gods, and change is unheard of." In "Wake Of The World," the buoyant final track from the Brooklyn band Gold's self-titled album, DeLano unfurls a laconic string of half-sung, half-spoken inner feelings and open statements about the sad and unsustainable state of society.
Set atop an aggressive, rubbery bass line, Christy Davis' straight-ahead drum beat and occasional vocal harmonies by Leslie Graves and Susan Hwang, DeLano delivers a toast and frustrated shrug to a world that now feels unrecognizable. At the end, she gets to the point, singing that while they'll be there for the demise with everyone else, she'll be numbing the pain with "some open-bar drinking and not too much thinking — to keep me from crying because everything's ... dying."
On Gold's Bandcamp page, the group offers up a "companion sermon" for the song, which reveals an evocative laundry list of grievances, from economic struggles to the undervaluing of education: "Teaching is too expensive now, God bless these kids they'll need it," it reads. When experienced as a whole, the message of "Wake Of The World" shines through.
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