Gold Connections Bring It All Back Home on Fortune

I go looking for infectious art that lands more than one way depending on the mood and the moment. Dig, if you will, track one of Gold Connections’ Popular Fiction from 2016. It’s called “Icarus,” and it moves like a man on the run shouting apologies and accusations and rhetorical questions before descending into a wall of sound that could have served as a conclusion were this not Will Marsh’s world.

It being Will Marsh’s world, we have ourselves a decrescendo which gives rise to a slow but steady chant: “Get back. Get back. Get back to rock and roll.” It starts quiet but builds up to a scream, and we’re taken back to the jangly riff where the jam commenced. If you’re on hand when it’s performed and you don’t join the chant, I wish to assert there’s something amiss within (or near) your core.

Consider this scene where Gold Connections was joined for “Icarus” by Will Toledo of Carseat Headrest in June 2017: “Get back to rock and roll” is, on the one hand, a very funny thing to say to oneself and others. I laugh when I think about it sometimes. But I don’t always laugh. I often take it as a personal admonition to get real again, to access my feeling function anew and to let it surface. To believe once more that the heart of rock and roll is still beating and available to all comers. The very thought of Popular Fiction (especially “Icarus” and “Bad Intentions”) takes me there.

And now, lo and behold, Fortune is among us. Whereas Pavement and the Rolling Stones were helpful points of reference on Popular Fiction, Fortune evokes the Cars and, for me, Karl Wallinger’s World Party. There’s romance and bitterness and a keen eye for the militant denial of empire armed to the teeth, surveilling our moves, and funded by our taxes. Here’s “Stick Figures”:

I dreamed of grad school and marriage
A young romantic, late Obama era
Don’t get hung for a memory
It ain’t a crime like hurting private property

Love’s labor gets lost for myriad reasons, but, this time around, Marsh seems peculiarly committed to addressing–with his sardonic wit–the pervading corruption. The reverberations of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the summer that followed it can be sensed here, alongside the killing of counter-protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville three years prior. “Hurricane” and “Ammunition” seem born out of falling in love in what ruins and wreck get left behind by talkers in suits and ties, by people who treat human beings like brute force test subjects.

But understand, Marsh still keeps it funny (or possibly funny if we’re willing to go there with him). I suspect I’ll be mulling “Fool’s Gold” for a good long time:

I made a list of things I won’t miss
I broke my brain, but I found my focus.

This sounds like hard-won hope as one who’s surviving–or trying to–on the other side of the algorithm. Like the whole of Fortune, there’s like being clung to here even as an awful lot is being grieved and mourned. But there’s a momentary wholeness in the deep breathing out–the bodying forth–of heartache before getting back to remembering and resisting and remembering again. Gold Connections bring it all back home. Where the hurt and the heart is.