Listening to Getting Killed, the third album from Geese, one thing is clear: life ain’t all glitz and gravy, or whatever the fuck Lester Bangs said fifty-one years ago. It’s a terrible time to be alive in America. If your nerves aren’t yet totally shot from the consequences of humanity’s spoon-fed voyage into the maw of fascism, they soon will be—unless, of course, you’re in bed with the oppressors, sucking off spray-tanned buffoons while their Pope-killing, Ivy Leaguer mouthpieces ogle from a nearby, well-placed cuck chair. The apocalypse is especially nigh on Getting Killed, and Geese are our mighty, sobering keepers, strapped to the nines with guns, cowbells, and very few answers.
“Morning walked me out of here with no shoes,” Cameron Winter vibrates on the title track, as streaking chords split open a Ukrainian choir sample. “And one foot doesn’t wanna stay alive!” Across eleven chapters of malaise, Geese thread doomsday whispers into potent and isochronal refrains. Images of snake-charming, war, death, and corruption collide into music that rattles in Sticky Fingers’s surplus of country-fried riffage and Astral Weeks‘s literary fountain of rhythm yet devours the same spirituals that Nina Simone made both strange and captivating. What I’m getting at is: Getting Killed is a deeply exciting, provoking, and necessary gulf of no-fuss rock music.
Geese’s last LP—the blazing, bizarre, and bonkers 3D Country—had this, as I put it in my review then, gnarled, chaotic, and vibrant sonic anarchy to it. Honky tonk bombast, Cormac McCarthy imagery, and gonzo freefalls sauntered and convulsed in trash-rock blood clots and arena-big pockets of axe-wielding genius and hair-raising dazzle. I interviewed Winter and his bandmate Emily Green shortly after that, and they called themselves “unique little snowflakes” in the face of post-punk—genre troublemakers with an eye for contradiction, hoping to obliterate rock and roll’s too-serious bent. They’re like Martin Rev and Alan Vega, if Martin Rev and Alan Vega liked to choogle.
Listening to 3D Country now is akin to watching someone laugh while all of their limbs get twisted backwards, as guitars throb like an empty tooth socket and percussion clatters until your back straightens. I grew up listening to ball-busting, face-melting rock and roll—the kind of music I thought needed saved by an album like 3D Country. If Getting Killed is out to prove anything at all, it’s that rock and roll doesn’t need saving. Rock and roll needs playing, and, by God, Geese do exactly that. In its loose fervor, Winter, Green, Dominic DiGesu, and Max Bassin marry fire-branded Hollywood sleaze with craggy, top-lined jazz-rock and bellyaching, twisted tempos nearly gone to the dogs.
This record isn’t an obvious successor to 3D Country, but an appropriate marriage of it and Winter’s solo debut from last year, Heavy Metal. If his voice was a tonal miracle on “Nausicäa (Love Will Be Revealed)” and “The Rolling Stones,” then his verbal tics here are plentiful and splendored in a dizzying, circular style. Lines are repeated often, like the “There’s a bomb in my car!” refrain sung thirteen times on “Trinidad,” or Winter pining “I’ve got half a mind…” four times before reaching a tragic, comical conclusion, “…to just pay for the lobotomy and tell ‘em get rid of the bad times.” His exaggerations and affectations sound downright religious during “Getting Killed,” “Islands of Men,” and “Trinidad.”
Winter’s lyricism—at times oblique, at times sincere, and at times campy—commands your attention, too. A hilarious bickering on “Half Real” (“You may say that our love was only half real / But that’s only half true”) reveals a shadowy contemplation on “Bow Down” (“I was a sailor / I was a sailor and now I’m a boat / I was a car / I was a car and now I’m the road”); there’s humor in the turmoil on “Getting Killed” (“Yeah I am getting up to leave / Yeah I am taking off my pants / I’m getting out of this gumball machine”) and there is defiance in “Taxes” (“If you want me to pay my taxes / You’d better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down”). And his bandmates convene with the haints of rock and roll bedlam, capricious in their tangents through folky lullabies (“Au Pays du Cocaine”), dainty, strummy ooze (“Cobra”), metallic skronks (“100 Horses”), skittering, barrelhouse backdrops (“Islands of Men”), stomping, controlled burns (“Husbands”), and stormy, percussive carnage (“Long Island City Here I Come”).
There’s a lot of imagery on Getting Killed that I don’t quite understand, and I’d reckon it’s not totally foolish to assume that Winter doesn’t understand some of his own gibberish, either. This is music without trend or institution but driven by intuition and improvisation. When Winter garbles, “I have been fucking destroyed by the city tonight, I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” on the title track, you can suss out the point he’s trying to make. But a passage like “I saw 100 horses dancing, maybe 124, all horses must go dancing” is far more evocative, before eventually collapsing into meaning: “There is only dance music in times of war.” Winter’s psychic liberations in “Long Island Here I Come,” like him kicking someone’s ass “up and down this street,” are met by a conclusion potent with this startling, tender aroma: “I have no idea where I’m going, here I come.”
But I wouldn’t consider any of Winter’s idioms to be throwaways. He and Geese split the difference between facts and truth with brilliant music scraped from the ceilings of 30-minute jam sessions with producer Kenneth Blume (FKA Kenny Beats), captured in Los Angeles during the wildfires. What can be extrapolated from a record like Getting Killed, I reckon, is that these four New Yorkers, all of whom are barely a lick older than current college students, righteously gnaw back at the decay reaching for them, us. There’s inertia in the phrases, misanthropy in the voicings, like when the title track and “Husbands” both whir through disaffection in different fonts. I sometimes envy the numb people, and I suppose Geese sometimes envy them, too—truest when Winter belts out something like, “There’s a horse on my back and I may be stomped flat, but my loneliness is gone,” or “I’m trying to talk over everybody in the world, I, I can’t even taste my own tears.”
Perhaps the Rolling Stones ripoff allegations abound again, as the first ninety seconds of “Taxes”’s auxiliary percussion could have certainly spawned from the crumbs of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”’s Latin-flavored, 5-minute crescendo. But when Green’s guitar soars and Winter’s “Doctor, doctor! Heal yourself!” oration crushes in a stupor of blistering lunacy, the song becomes a seance of chrome, sweat, and invention. Hearing “Taxes” for the first time in July, when Bassin’s staved percussion and a pinch of tambourine gnashed through the yawns of summer, I was reminded why furious music is so often worth the wait.
And to think: These are the same kids that arrived in unevenness on Projector four years ago. The next decade will beckon a hundred Geese imitators but few will even have the mettle to wipe the dirt off Cameron Winter’s Jordan 11s, because his incantations curdle like blood and his bandmates grow ridiculous and benevolent in their unorthodoxy around him. The listlessness of present-day rock and roll pales in the brightness of Geese’s mockery of 4/4 traditionalism. The panning on “Trinidad”! The cresting, glowy groove woven into the second act of “Taxes”! They love making music so much they can’t help but obliterate every inch of it when doing so, and a computer could never replicate an album as unpredictable as this. “A masterpiece belongs to the dead,” Winter croons halfway through “Long Island Here I Come.” If that’s the case, then Geese are six feet under.
Getting Killed is out September 26 via Partisan Records.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
