On Getting Killed, Geese Go Hard In The Paint
Graphic by Sophie Parrish
By Lucca Swain
Credit: Play It Again/Partisan Records
“All people must smile,” he says, “in times of war.” The rhythm section backing him is rocksteady, moderato, undoubtedly tighter than nails. At times, his voice swells with a devilish passion, letting slip loose little fragments of morality — “All people, in times of war” —which cohere in a vacuum, but which when pieced together — “All people, in times of war, must go to the circus” — form only a greater puzzle, an expressionist image where the individual pieces make more sense than the whole. When the song inevitably reaches its fever pitch, his voice devolving into an unhinged rasp while the cacophony of instruments swell into an instant of krautrock ecstasy, singer Cameron Winter lets out what may as well be the track’s defining couplet: “We have danced for for too long/ And now I must change completely,” before abruptly cutting the track off. For the unaware listener, this distinctly Geese mode of expression may be confounding, but for the New York band and their new record Getting Killed, it sounds like nothing less than pure, unadulterated freedom.
Geese, the four-man rock jack-of-all-trades consisting of vocalist Cameron Winter, drummer Max Bassin, guitarist Emily Green, and bassist Dominic DiGesu, don’t just make rock music — they understand it, probably better than almost any other band out there, indie or not. 3D Country, the band’s 2023 outing, was proof of that more than anything else; that record, in addition to being packed to the brim with alt-country bangers, saw the band meticulously deconstructing country as a genre, extracting every little pleasure, every cliche, every association good or bad which has clung to the style over time and cemented itself as genre necessity—before Frankensteining it all back together in a way that best suited their particular idiosyncrasies as a band. Familiar words, melodies, ideas are repurposed, the blues fashioned into monster thrashers like “2122” and “Undoer,” or ungodly catchy two-steppers like “3D Country” and “Gravity Blues.” Over all of it, Winter belts out his signature non sequiturs (“And I was the country/ When we were young/ And I was water, I was rum”) coaxing out the essence of the country without ever quite painting the full picture.
That is to say, if 3D Country was Geese’s vision of Americana, then Getting Killed is the spiritual music equivalent. That’s not to say that Getting Killed is explicitly religious — if anything, Winter’s solo record Heavy Metal was far more explicit in that regard, even when considering that the theme of religion on tracks such as “$0” was kept at a post-ironic distance by Winter himself — but rather what Geese pursues, and achieves, on their latest record is a palpable sense of musical ecstasy, the feeling of becoming so engrossed in a song and the overlapping tides of groove and melody and harmony that you only wish that it would go on for another verse, another refrain, the subversion of an unexpected left-turn and the overwhelming biblical ecstasy of the final payoff. Armed with the producer once known as Kenny Beats, Geese ditch the classic-rock stylings of their last LP and opt instead for loping, hypnotic song structures, the thumping, lint-in-the-pocket rhythm of drummer Max Bassin acting as the tonal center of many compositions across the record. As a drummer, Bassin is criminally overlooked, his airtight feel and tasteful improvisation providing Geese with a far funkier rhythmic base in comparison to their indie contemporaries, in both their recordings and live shows. Bassin’s parts are excellent because they manage the balance between ‘straightforward’ and ‘sick’ almost perfectly, always right on the mark while still making room for impressive showmanship. The six-minute highlight “Islands of Men” sees that rhythmic power at the frontline, its first half stabilizing itself around Bassin’s nasty pocket — his drums are mixed to the very forefront — and Emily Green’s mesmeric picking, the two musicians moving round and round like interlocking cogs in a machine, while Winter’s intones a mantra/plea for the listener to “Stop running away/ From what is real and what is fake.” It really all sounds absolutely lovely, though the real surprise of the track comes in its second half, wherein the band releases all of the tension unknowingly built up in the track’s first stretch, and “Islands of Men” transitions into a full-on jam session, every band member bouncing and riffing off of each other like ping-pong balls in an incandescent moment of musical bliss; it’s one of the most authentically ‘cool’ moments in their entire discography.
There’s a remarkable feeling of flexibility which permeates the tracklist of Getting Killed. On every single track, the band is following their instincts and pulling inspiration from every which way without worry, at times incorporating the drawn-out psych jams of krautrock bands like Can and Neu, and at others enlisting JPEGMafia to scream backing vocals on opener “Trinidad.” Even the album’s cover is a direct homage to Boredoms’ 1999 recordVision Creation Newsun. Geese wear their inspirations on their sleeve with pride, which is especially noteworthy when listening to the stellar closing track “Long Island City Here I Come.” If there is any one song on Getting Killed which could be accurately labeled a “religious experience,” it would be this one. Rather than the suave drumming and guitar playing of the rest of the record, “Long Island City” has all the driving force and manic energy of a ritual, the drums pounding with the force of a hundred men as the song’s tempo accelerates to breakneck speeds, and Winter’s usual bravado is replaced by a frantic, hysterical panting; “Here I come, here I come,” a chorus of Cameron Winters chant over and over and over and over. The influence of the aforementioned Boredoms record looms heavy here, the tribal-esque rhythm section and eventual ascent to cloud nine both playing out similarly to several segments of the Japanese band’s one-of-a-kind experimental rock record. But in the moment, does it really matter where it comes from, or why? When “Long Island City” kicks back in with the full band, and the pace rockets sky-high, even faster than before, and the racket becomes so loud you can’t even think, and it keeps pummeling, pummeling, pummeling against your brain, it becomes difficult to focus on anything but the sheer exultant beauty of that instant, because it just keeps going and going and going and there isn’t anything to put faith in besides Cameron Winter and his goofy rasping voice and his pained screaming for “Maria” and a Long Island City which he seems impossibly determined to reach. There isn’t much you really can do, except sit back, enjoy the music, and allow yourself to be baptized by the all-encompassing clamor.