In the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, which follows the singer-songwriter around the age of 30, a TV interviewer asks what Cohen means when he says he tries to wake up in a state of grace. He describes it as “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you,” adding, “It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order.” I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun Geese’s revelatory new album, Getting Killed, which wastes no time pointing to the carnage all around while spending most of it in a fervid, ludicrous freefall that fills the gaps between the bizarre chaos of 2023’s 3D Country and Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal. It rides a car with a bomb, becomes the car, becomes the road going nowhere. Until seeing that Leonard Cohen clip, I had trouble figuring out why its lawlessness felt so graceful: there’s something Godlike about it.
1. Trinidad
Geese may be positioned as young luminaries salvaging rock ‘n’ roll for the new generation, but they make one thing clear: their music is hardly effortless. Not just because they’ve proved themselves more than a group of prodigious post-punks, as Projector gave some the impression, but because they’re so quick to squander the genre’s easy tricks. In place of any kind of swaggering riff, ‘Trinidad’ staggers about, as actual geese might, portending chaos. Before repeatedly shouting the JPEGMAFIA-assisted refrain, “There’s a bomb in my car!” Cameron Winter begins by singing the words “I tried,” adding in a “so hard” as a haunted double echoes the exhaustion. The threat is a jolt of adrenaline, sharpening his pen as well as his emphatic intonation. The apocalypse is well underway: “Nothing’s been said for four and a half days/ When that light turns red I’m driving away.” Here the double swirls over Winter’s lead, panned to mirror the voices in his head, as the rest of the band gestures toward what might only be called self-implosion.
2. Cobra
If you heard ‘Taxes’ before the album’s release, its most quotable line, “There is only dance music in times of war,” will spring to mind when ‘Cobra’ comes on. Having fervently established these are times of war, Winter sings, over a woozy jangle, “Baby, let me dance away forever.” Far from joyously rebelling, though, he’s entranced with no semblance of control, stuck in eternal obedience before defiantly despairing, “You can make the cobras dance/ But not me.” The double meaning of the opening line dawns on you: “Let me dance away forever.” Dispel the curse.
3. Husbands
The album’s first substantial groove, but compare that to IDLES’ ‘Gift Horse’, another equestrian-themed track from another Kenny Beats-produced album, Tangk: This is not about how fast and muscular his horse is, about “Look at him.” It’s not about making people move, either. The punishing bass and jumbled percussion, instead, evoke just how arduous it is to get ahead, tracing the weight on the singer’s body: “There’s a horse on my back/ And I may be stomped flat/ But my loneliness is gone.” Maybe not, he concedes – maybe no amount of pressure can numb the gnawing feeling out of existence. “And if my loneliness should stay/ Well, some are holiest that way.” You’ve probably heard that rationalization from a disaffected, hard-working man in your life; unless, of course, it’s buried in your head.
4. Getting Killed
A Ukrainian choir sample stands in for everybody in the world – a cacophony over which Winter can’t hear himself talk, so he must belt out one of his most impassioned performances, treading the line between operatic and just frantic. Yet underlying it is a professed emotional bankruptcy – “I can’t even taste my own tears/ They fall into an even sadder bastard’s eyes” – that could push any lover away. The loneliness allows him to indulge in escapist tendencies that illuminate and lend credence to the album’s title: “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.” There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cut in the middle of the track that sounds like losing your mind for a small second, then falling inconspicuously back into the rhythm of that same life that almost snapped you out.
5. Islands of Men
Guitarist Emily Green and bassist Dominic DiGesu stab at their instruments as if trying to force the truth down our throats: “You can’t keep/ Running away/ From what is real/ And what is fake,” Winter sings, accusatory but unable to extricate his own narrator from the delusion. As if literally responding to Winter’s call, the band literally stops, again, halfway through, then picks up the slow-burn, letting Winter’s poetic improvisations take the back seat while occasionally aligning in holy harmony. Instead of Winter’s voice, it’s for once the high piano notes and touches of brass that serve as harbingers of ecstasy. Not even he can outrun them.
6. 100 Horses
Unlike ‘Gift Horse’, the stomp of ‘100 Horses’ is not sleek – it’s skronked-out, trashy, borderline violent. Still, the song – even as Winter hilariously clarifies that it’s “maybe 124” – is nothing short of bombastic, getting fired up on the sarcasm and dance, two things he still has the absolute freedom to practice in times of war. “He said that I would never smile again, but not to worry,” he sings, referring to one General Smith, and you can practically see the nervous grin on his face. “For all people must stop smiling once they get what they’ve been begging for.” Some people have been begging for an album like Getting Killed, that captures the current feeling of a burning circus without sounding, for a lack of better word, cringe – Geese deliver because they’re good at cringing at the world around them while sounding absolutely serious. “We have danced for far too long and now I must change completely” is not the best marketing pitch, but it’s one hell of a closer. Grooveless Geese could still kill it.
7. Half Real
The change comes in the form of the album’s first (sort of) ballad, one that sways with the force of Winter’s idiosyncratic and humorous spirituality, contending, “You may say that our love was only half real/ But that’s only half true.” He tries to find some grace in the beatific arrangement, but a lobotomy sounds more worth it for the price. When another voice joins him in pleading to “get rid of the good times too,” you cannot doubt the heart of this record. You won’t be able to get it off your mind, either.
8. Au Pays du Cocaine
The song hews closest to the ragged lullabies of Heavy Metal, but nothing on that album was quite so emotionally or musically direct, if only to highlight its own obliviousness. When Winter’s voice shrinks to declare that he’s alright (way less convincing than the preceding “It’s alright”), you can’t help but feel the defeat, never more pronounced than when he sings, “You can change and still choose me.” The guitar line sounds like sunshine sparkling on waves, the rhythm almost like a breeze. Fake, obviously – he’s standing on a sinking boat – and the reality of his desperation is just as unassailable. He realizes he can’t run away from either, so he must believe.
9. Bow Down
The narrator must transform again: “I was a sailor and now I’m a boat/ I was a car and now I’m the road.” (On the title track, he was “a TV on the road.”) This is the band’s ragtime depiction of hell, reaching the point of mania where even the singer’s close circle sounds bemused by his self-talk, each musician going off on their own unhinged tangent.
10. Taxes
When ‘Taxes’ dropped in July, it felt like a first taste of Getting Killed’s unique lunacy. As the penultimate track on the album, it almost sounds like a comedown, a moral reckoning. Compare the way Winter sings “Now I’m in hell” on the previous song to the utter resignation with which he sentences himself there. At this point, there’s no telling what the difference is between defiance and despair, not even when he intones, “Doctor, doctor! Heal yourself!” What’s clear is that any sort of faith beyond the self has been crushed; he’s not clinging to love. “I will break my own heart from now on,” he belts, barely piecing himself together.
11. Long Island City Here I Come
Equal parts percussive workout and spiritual catharsis, ‘Long Island City Here I Come’ reveals the album’s origins as a series of jams, and you can easily imagine Geese stretching this one back out to 10 or even 20 minutes (as if they need more convergence with the world’s biggest jam band). But it’s also the sound of a band (or a frontman urging his band) pummeling towards uncertainty, through total annihilation. In a spectral vision, Winter is told “a masterpiece belongs to the dead.” Which means it belongs to the scared and nervous, who may well find home in Getting Killed.
