Heavy Metal captures a 22-year-old man barely old enough to legally drink in Brooklyn burdened with a voice that's heavy with a world-weariness, an unnameable loneliness that better befits a crooner slumped over a bar with experience for company. These songs channel Leonard Cohen’s solemnity with a beat poet’s hallucinations – animated by that voice, the one belonging to the lonely cowboy who made Geese so magnetic to begin with – in a way that makes obvious why they demand to exist in a project of their own.
It's an album torn between nihilism – a total loss of reason – and an acknowledgement of occasional beauty that makes you forget the rest, even for a moment. “$0” is a haunting piano ballad that swells into an exultant chorus of strings as Winter declares, raving like a street lunatic, “God is real God is real I’m not kidding God is actually real I’m not kidding this time I think God is actually for real…”
Winter has a gift of writing that damning lyric, that thing that gets under your skin (“Try as I may / To love what fits my hand / I don’t / I don’t…”), while also swinging the pendulum to the other side of absurdity as with “Nina + Field of Cops,” which sweats out Ginsberg-like ramblings like a raging fever. Whether it be in hymnal dignity or mania, Cameron Winter is in possession of a voice which knows and transcends it all.
