Getting Killed and Choosing Love
By Matthew Dodd
For the first forty-five seconds of Trinidad, the opening track from New York post-punk band Geese’s new album Getting Killed, there is a semblance of normality. Shuffling drums and a pedalling wah-wah guitar lick, accompanied by lead singer Cameron Winter’s plaintive cries of ‘I try so hard’, suggest a reflective, if unorthodox, serenity. Any such notion of peace and quiet is ruptured a moment later by a thunderous cacophony of sound: errant saxophones, frantic guitar and Winter’s howling refrain – ‘THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!’ This contradiction, an oscillation between grooving slacker-rock and erratic noise, dogs the album. That tension, tied by Winter’s often sensitive and often bizarre lyricism to the uneasy interplay between the modern world’s mundanity and absurdity, constitutes the album’s thematic through-line. In one moment, Winter is the world-weary Sisyphus of 21st-century life, trying his hardest to no avail; in the next, he is the red-pilled doomscroller with a bomb in his car. Geese wear their influences on their sleeves, but they are nothing if not blisteringly contemporary.
Not unlike one of their songs, Geese’s upward trajectory had, for years, been slow and rumbling before exploding, seemingly spontaneously, into the meteoric over the last summer. Since 2023’s 3D Country bought them a place in the peripheries of mainstream success, they’ve carved out a steady reputation as one of the most mercurial and exciting bands in the New York scene. A string of viral singles through the summer, bolstered by the release of Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal last year, has parachuted them into online superstardom, without any surrendering of their distinctly un-starlike style. They, like The Strokes before them, have become the ambassadors of New York’s yuppie-private-school-punk-rock-greasy-hair subculture. Cameron Winter operates in the same ambiguous space between cult leader and awkward schoolchild as Julian Casablancas did in the 2000s, appearing in both interviews and performance as much uncomfortable as he is totally in control. The band, eschewing the spotlight whilst languishing in the attention it’s won them, play to that most Gen Z affectation of self-conscious diffidence; the band are all under 25.
Getting Killed moves with picaresque conviction through a surreal soundscape of modernity. The title track sets a discordant sea of chanting voices against pounding off-beat drums and a drudging blues riff before abruptly pulling back to reveal a gentle guitar line and Winter’s cracked, sensitive vocals. The song continues to jerk between the two sounds until both are subsumed by a wave of branching melodies and counter-melodies. Winter knows when to let the band’s musical chemistry take the spotlight, allowing his voice to become at times simply another piece of instrumental firmament. Islands of Men is carried by a grooving synthesis of guitar and drum lines, against which Winter’s vocals provide playful counterweight. The single 100 Horses is perhaps the most straightforward track on the album: an anthemic rocker, the kind of song Led Zeppelin might’ve made had they been raised on YouTube and cultural oversaturation.
Winter’s lyricism is as bafflingly brilliant as ever. He has all the enigma of Jeff Mangum without ever venturing far from his emotional directness, evoking at times the genius of his avowed heroes Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The bizarre – ‘my son is in bed / my daughters are dead / my wife’s in the shed / my husband’s burning lead’ – is kept in delicate harmony with the simple and beautiful – ‘and if my loneliness should stay / well, some are holiest that way’.
A certain spirituality runs through Getting Killed, a kind of sarcastic desire for a post-modern religious meaning that dares not speak its name. Winter’s solo track $0 ends with the singer’s rambling confession that ‘God is real, God is real, I’m not kidding this time God is actually real’: similar moments of religious epiphany pepper Getting Killed. On breakthrough single Taxes, Winter’s warbling baritone laments that ‘I should burn in Hell / but I don’t deserve this’ and threatens that ‘if you want me to pay my taxes / you’d better come over with a crucifix / you’re gonna have to nail me down.’ Between ‘nail me’ and ‘down’ a buoyant guitar line fulminates across a song which has hitherto been accompanied by a bottom-heavy assortment of plodding drums and droning bass. The moment has a baptismal quality, a revelatory instance of self-discovery as light dashes across a soundscape marked by darkness. Winter continues to paraphrase Luke’s Gospel – ‘Doctor, heal yourself’ – before forging a new thesis: ‘I will break my own heart from now on.’ The song adopts this half-removed, self-effacing religiosity with familiar reticence but nevertheless finds an earnest truth in it: a radical freedom, a breaking away from the married scourges of sin (hell) and modernity (taxes). No wonder that Taxes has become an immediate favourite in performance, an orgiastic refutation of hyper-modern anxiety.
Getting Killed is an intricate, freewheeling trip through modern life’s surreal minutiae, an adventure whose complexity never threatens its listenability. Though it might lack the frenetic, hard-rocking highs of Mysterious Love or 2122, it supplants them with something even more interesting, a ruminative sincerity. Change lies at the centre of the album. Standout track Au Pays du Cocaine dwells, over lilting riffs and angelic backing vocals, on the possibility of reconciling an ever-shifting world with emotional stability. ‘You can change’, Winter wails, ‘and still choose me.’ Life in the post-post-modern world is as hectic and unpredictable as a seven-minute jam track, inscrutable as a Cameron Winter lyric, but that doesn’t mean we can’t hold on to what we love. For a band as drenched in ironic internet culture as Geese, the beating heart of their latest record is as earnest as could be.
The magic of Geese, on this album more than ever, is that theirs is a joke we as an audience aren’t in on. Here is a band of schoolfriends, content to play to each other more than any crowd. In concerts, Winter will race through lyrics to make his bandmates laugh; songs that the band enjoy will go on for double their recorded length. On one track they’re a country band, on the next they’re a Steely Dan tribute. At every step, Geese panders to no critics, no viral success, no mainstream acclaim- instead, they remain the band they themselves find most exciting. We wouldn’t want them any other way.
One step forward, two steps back?
By Edward Clark
All eyes are on Geese. Following their critically acclaimed sophomore release 3D Country and subsequent EP 4D Country, excitement for their third album Getting Killed has been amping up. This hype was only furthered by lead singer Cameron Winter’s solo release Heavy Metal last December: a diversion from Geese’s rock roots, Winter’s work swapped 3D Country’s colourful jam-band sound for cascading piano ballads. Placing emotional lyricism and powerful vocal performances at the forefront, Winter showcased his versatility as a singer and his strength as a writer. For a band who have showcased so much creative potential, fans expected another strange departure from their previous work. Getting Killed feels like Geese playing it safe.
Having come up parallel to the post-rock scene based largely in Britain, sometimes called the ‘windmill scene’ or ‘post-Brexit’ rock (Shame, Squid, Black Midi etc.), Geese have been unafraid to place their New York identity front and centre. The band’s Spotify bio reads “NYC” and nothing else; their love for their hometown continues to glow on Getting Killed. ‘Bow Down’ wears its Strokes influence on its sleeve, Winter’s surreal religious metaphors underscored by fuzzy, driving guitar riffs and droning horns. Keeping the pace up, the song is an easy standout. After descending into a noisy instrumental section, accompanied by blaring car horns and mesmerising drum patterns, the song explodes into an awesome finale.
Where Geese achieve the same level of urgency as they do in Bow Down – emotionally or instrumentally – the album soars. Lead single Taxes is a fantastic blend of disconcerting imagery and tight accompaniment. The guitar tone is bright, blending nicely with Winter’s emotional vocalisations. Islands of Men is a more meditative cut, but still maintains a building crescendo as Winter sings about fear and ‘running away’ over a hypnotising, laidback guitar riff. Trinidad is packed with surreal panic – as the album begins at a smooth, steady pace, it is instantly offset by a frenzy of dissonant horn, bass, guitar, and sporadic drum fills. ‘There’s a bomb in my car!’, Winter shouts. Somehow, this noisy hysteria takes the form of a chorus, and somehow it works perfectly.
Despite these highlights, Getting Killed is a less creative album then their last. Less compelling tracks (Cobra, Husbands, and Half real for example) are hindered by the band’s reliance on one particular sound. The track-list merges together; each song struggles to carve out its own identity. The weirdness that the band embraced on 3D Country fails to materialise here. Winter is less silly and less melodic on Getting Killed: where Cowboy Nudes and Gravity Blues bubbled with soulful energy, Getting Killed is grittier and darker. The wide range of bizarre influences which shaped the playful sound of their previous LP are missing here; as a result, weaker songs lack the texture that made 3D and 4D country so unique. Further, Winter’s ability to create catchy, emotional ballads is not showcased here. There is no Love Takes Miles to be found on Getting Killed. The closest Geese get to striking the same emotional chord as Winter’s solo work is on Au Pays du Cocaine, a breakup song reimagined in their own New York style.
Nevertheless, the album is great. For Geese, ‘playing it safe’ is clearly an apt move. Their fanbase is growing, and they’ve recently set off on a multi-continent tour, including plenty of festival spots. As Cameron Winter admitted in an interview with GQ Magazine earlier this year, “Sometimes you’re walking down the street, and you feel like you could just make 40 albums.” The band’s love for making music shines through most of all.
Featured Image: Mark Sommerfield