Hail.
Image courtesy of @kris_ricepees
When I consider the character of Cameron Winter, the lead vocalist of Geese, I imagine an aging, grizzled sort that has stumbled and maybe even murdered his way out of a Hemingway novel. Somewhere in this journey into literary oblivion he has tussled with a dragon, which has ripped off most of an arm or a leg. A kindly audience in a brave new world plies him with food and drink for his tale. His most frightening and yet mesmerising quality isn’t his missing limb, nor the vacant stare he sometimes frisbees through windows. It’s that voice when he recounts a series of spectacular disasters, what beauty resides within abject failure and total loss. One minute he’s rambling under his breath, and you’re straining to hear the details of quarrels he’s had with careless lovers, petulant gods. The next, his delivery commences a kind of radioactive decay, like you’re watching a reformed supervillain recall why he chose the darkness at all. On Getting Killed, Geese’s exceptional new album, Cameron Winter sounds like a charismatic drunk, a pleading priest, a soldier who still hears the battlefield in his dreams. He’s only 23.
I don’t like to cook on Sundays. I’d rather spend the morning reading book reviews, for books I’ll then purchase but never finish, and then evanescing for several hours in the chaos of the National Football League. Recently I was in Neukölln on a brisk, lemon-coloured afternoon, waiting on an order for Jamaican food. I took a walk up a quiet street and the sun made faces at me through cracks in pre-autumnal foliage. I figured I’d give the jerk chicken 15 minutes tops. Fill the time up with three or four songs from some critically acclaimed project or other.
I was vaguely familiar with Geese, in the way that I’m vaguely familiar with most modern bands. The lead singer has an interesting lilt, and maybe they have a banger I’ll spin for a couple months, before I replace them with the next 7/10 Pitchfork experience. I think the transitory nature of experiences beyond just music, this need to have engagement built into things, in order for them to attract investment, has had a harmful effect on instrumental rock. Its visibility, and (I’m awfully sorry) its purity as well.
If you’d asked me exactly 12 months ago what I thought of Geese, I would have mixed them up with Fontaines DC, or Swans. ‘Husbands’ washed over me just as the sunlight did, and I honestly couldn’t believe what I was hearing: how was this the same band, with the same frontman, that produced (no disrespect at all) 2023’s 3D Country?
‘Husbands’ is such a difficult song to recommend, because of its terrifying depth. Winter starts off mumbling some defeatist refrain over a steady drum-beat and a lowbrow, repentant guitar chord. Suddenly his voice begins to rise, like an ocean wave that’s been building up in secret, before it’s joined by moaning souls in damn near baptismal chorus. It sounds crazed and beseeching, and you can literally feel holy water splashing over your noggin as the sound shatters all around your headphones. That Sunday afternoon my heart almost raced out of my chest. I had to centre myself, pat the air down with my hands, plant my feet on the sidewalk, deliberately exhale. I haven’t heard anything like this in years.
Will it wash/ your hair clean/When your husbands/ all die?
Will you know/ what I mean? Will you know/ what I mean?
A large reason this hymnal dirge works is because it sits on such spare, calculated instrumentation. Winter’s co-conspirators are a motley crew that’s taken to his old man warbles and shrugged, Okay, sure, shucks, at a side-quest to retrieve that maimed leg. All over ‘Getting Killed’, they seem to know exactly when the mood swings are coming; how to align that melodic schizophrenia without having to lay down two different sets of track. I haven’t had a rock band prostrate me, devastate me, in years.
Imagine a heart was a creature you could keep in a jar, while you waited to transplant it or gift it away to someone special. Also imagine it was the sort of creature you had to check in on every couple hours, that you couldn’t leave to its own devices for too long — because at any moment it might beat so hard it would destroy its jar. This is what a Geese song is nowadays. ‘Bow Down’, the clearest evidence on the new record that this band can and will tear a roof off live, scales its sonic fury to culminate in the perfect anthem of revenge. On a rattling opening, with speed that doesn’t in the slightest inflect Winter with any false sense of urgency, he tells us why this crew is here — why they’re in your town, robbing your bank.
“I was a sailor, and now I’m a boat. I was a car, and now I’m the road.”
The drums and the guitars pick up, and Winter channels the ministry of the forests again — dragging this strange, hideous gospel across his bones, out his chest, onto the tips of his fingers: “I was kneeling/ on the turnpike/ With an angel/ down my throat/ She said, You don’t know/ what it’s like to bow down, down, down to Maria’s dead bones.” If I make it to March, I’m going to witness Geese drill a hole in the earth at ASTRA Kulturhaus, and my spirit will follow theirs into whatever nether realm has possessed them with this glorious revolution.
If you get far enough, and pursue the band down the same rabbit holes I did, to try and understand how this is the same group of people that crafted 3D Country, you will find passing recognition of a metaphysical transformation rooted in Winter’s well-received solo album, Heavy Metal. That record made my eyes wet on the train, and I think unlocked something highly specific for Geese as a band; it enabled them and Winter to isolate and expand the possibilities in his vocal delivery, before essentially decorating round its mania with Christmas lights. This is my rough, idiotic theory on how they could have crafted the distinct magic of Getting Killed, where the songs in and of themselves, the record in and of itself, and Winter in and of himself, all achieve the exciting variety and yet satisfying consistency of a box of luxury chocolate mushrooms. (With tonnns of credit due, of course, to the map-making skills of Kenny Blume, already loved and adored in hip-hop circles as Kenny Beats.)
If it says ‘Geese’ on it, or Winter, I want it now, immediately, vampirically. Because what if this is the last time anyone reaches for the moon and the stars and actually gets some dust beneath their nails.
