On a recent Friday night, indie rock band Geese, which formed in New York City in 2016 when its members were still a couple of years shy of driving a car, played the final show of their North American tour. The show at the Brooklyn Paramount, a Twenties baroque movie theater turned concert hall, was a jubilant homecoming. (Even Mr. Met was present, perhaps paying his respects after the band's bassist, Dominic DiGesu, told a reporter, “If there are billionaires in the world, the Mets are the only ones worth financing in my opinion.”) In the months after the Geese released their third studio album, Getting Killed, the band was ecstatically hailed as the redeemer of a certain brand of rowdy, lawless rock 'n' roll. Critics love to make such exciting claims, and fans love to ridicule them. But isn't that what controlled hysteria is all about? Geese are a dramatic outfit in their own right, prone to bursts of noise, meandering retreats and wild bleats. A reasonable and restrained response to this music is in some fundamental sense contrary to its spirit.
At the Paramount—Friday was the second of two sold-out shows—Geese frontman Cameron Winter invited members of one of his opening bands on stage to perform an abbreviated cover of the Stooges' “Fun House,” a nearly eight-minute 1970 song dedicated to God knows what. (“Yes, I came to play, and I mean to play/Yes, I came to play, and I want to play very well.”) “Please welcome the horns and everything,” Winter said as the musicians walked across the stage. Geese are often compared to ambitious early-millennium bands like Radiohead and The Strokes, but The Stooges may actually be the most accurate analogue – in terms of outlook, if not exactly musically. The Geese are irritable, and especially Winter, who has been known to fumble with reporters, lie, dodge questions or give unhinged answers. (The band's apparent lack of interest in being sincere or seriously engaging with the press also strikes me as very coded millennial: ironic detachment, in general.) I've come to like this about Geese. There's no need to hold my hand after the album's release, and Winter's indifference when it comes to annotating his songs creates a kind of welcome friction with the emotional intensity of the music itself. When the band recently appeared on “The Zane Lowe Show,” Winter responded to a question about the writing of “Husbands,” one of the album's best and most complex songs, by saying, “I don't remember,” only venturing that it might have happened near the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn's notoriously rotten waterway. “You know, a dolphin died there last week… or something like that,” Winter suggested. Inside he was wearing dark glasses.
This approach works in part because Getting Killed is a raw and exposed piece of art. Winter clearly has unusually deep feelings, even if he has little interest in conducting cathexis outside the studio. At the concert, I found myself involuntarily crying during “Au Pays du Cocaine,” a loose, heartbreaking song that builds to a kind of transcendental climax. Perhaps the title is a twisted allusion to Bruegel's Het Luilekkerland, a 1567 oil painting depicting the mental consequences of sloth and hedonism; “Het Luilekkerland” loosely translates as “Land of the Cockaigns”, a mythical medieval wonderland in which all appetites, no matter how aberrant, are satisfied. (In proper French, the phrase would be “Le Pays de Cocagne.”) This connection might seem like a stretch if only the limits (and dangers) of satisfaction weren't such a central theme in Winter's lyrics. As he sings on the album's title track, “It's a pretty good life that's killing me.”
Of course, it's difficult to say exactly what “Au Pays du Cocaine” is about. Winter's vocals are pleading, as if begging someone not to leave: “You can stay with me and just pretend I'm not there”; “You can be free and still come home”; “Baby, you can change and still choose me.” To me he sounds like someone who is in an unstable relationship, trying to make whatever concessions are necessary to avoid being abandoned. (Something about this song reminds me of a particularly heartbreaking scene from the penultimate episode of Mad Men in which Betty Draper, after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, tells her teenage daughter, “I've learned to believe people when they say it's over. They don't want to say it, so it's usually true.”) In the music video, Winter sits at the dinner table, singing to a child. At the end, he goes upstairs, sits in the crib and assumes the fetal position. (When Winter was growing up, his parents had an open marriage, which his mother, Molly Roden Winter, described in some detail in her 2024 memoir Bigger.) In Paramount, for some reason, the line that really stuck with me is also one of the most enigmatic in the song: “Like a sailor in a big green boat.” It's a meaningless image, which I believe is its main beauty – the potential for projection. It inevitably makes me think of the people I've lost, now adrift on some unknowable sea. Winter's voice, froggy and sad, filled the theater. He played a long guitar solo before the second verse. The pace slowed. For a moment I felt as if something inside me had dissolved.
Even “Taxes,” perhaps the most euphoric song on Getting Killed, is both darkly funny (“If you want me to pay my taxes/You better come with a crucifix/You’ll have to nail me”) and downright dark (“Doctor, Doctor, heal yourself/And I’ll break my own heart/From now on I’ll break my own heart”). These songs rely heavily on Winter's wonderful voice, shaky and slurred, and on drummer Max Bassin, who plays with great restraint but plenty of emotion. (The drums on “Husbands,” one of my favorite tracks of the year, are tight and edgy and weird and perfect.)
There is an underlying level of melancholy and loneliness in everything Winter writes, perhaps due to the state of the modern world or perhaps the time in which he came of age. Winter, who is twenty-three, recently turned eighteen when COVID-19 The pandemic has hit New York. In the video series “A View from the Bridge,” in which guests stand outside and tell stories into a red phone, Winter talked about buying a virtual reality headset during that turbulent and terrible spring. He started messing around in VR chat and one day ended up on a Russian server located at a gas station in Siberia. He came across two lovers in the snow. “Something about it was very tragic,” he said. “It was a very human moment and I think about it all the time.” It's entirely possible that Getting Killed and its predecessor, 2023's 3D Country, are the first two great works COVID-19The music of the era is less about how it re-enacts the events themselves and more about how the contours of isolation and fear brought on by the pandemic seem to have shaped Winter's consciousness at such a pivotal moment in his life.
In Brooklyn, Geese returned to the stage for an encore. “This is the last show of the US tour, so this song will be the last,” Winter said. “We felt it was right to end this tour with a cover of Waylon Jennings, a legend who lives in our hearts.” The band began playing “Trinidad,” the opening track to “Getting Killed.” This is definitely not a Waylon Jennings song, although I suppose it shares a sort of rough outlaw spirit. “I’m trying,” Winter groaned. Guitarist Emily Green played a nervous little riff. “I try/I try so hard.” Winter sighed sharply. “I’m trying,” he sang again, before launching into the song’s frantic, screaming chorus: “There’s a bomb in my car!” The crowd went crazy – they were rolling around the crowd, mowing, collapsing on themselves. The lights flashed. There was a feeling of dizzying collective liberation. Green, still fiddling with his guitar pedal, was the last to leave the stage. The crowd left the theater, stunned, satiated, seemingly devastated. ♦
