By Matt Bailey for the Kaohsiung Times
“I should burn in hell. But I don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.”
The hype is strong, but it’s also real. The omnipotent, omnipresent, stinking algorithm got a whiff of my interest and is spewing praise all over my FYP as the end-of-year lists come out. In this rare case, I can’t be mad about it.
Getting Killed by Geese hits all my marks, tickles all my fancies, and the full “rotation” (stream) of this late September release weighs heavy as Ogenesson in my brain and from my speakers.
The first time I played this, I knew it was going to be something formative, something special. I’m not as much about the music (I’m too dumb to understand all that, but I can feeeel it, mannnn) as I am about the lyrics.
And oh my G… from the jump, frontman Cameron Winter grabs you by the throat with surrealism perfectly blended with real-world imagery, smushed with emotion. Winter warbles his vocals all over the place to firmly land somewhere deep into your guts, leaving you feeling feelings, hard.
This guy, a 23-year-old (of course) New York City fella, taps into and expresses the sense of dread that I feel weighs us all down in this late-stage capitalist, Neo-Liberal hellscape we call home. There’s still somehow some level of optimism available here, too… The “It’s not over ’til it’s over” sentiment is palpable and vital.
“All people must smile / In times of war,” from the track “100 Horses,” exemplifies it well. Why not, indeed? What else can you do? A lyric as simple and direct as “Will you stop running away?” on the song “Islands of Men” has no right to hit so hard. Yet, it surely does, bud.
For me, this band “is giving”: The Rolling Stones, The Strokes, Nick Cage, and The Velvet Underground, all the while managing to sound Jazzy, entirely modern, even post-modern (if that means anything), universal, and important. They feel like some kind of street preachers getting us ready for the inevitable societal collapse.
Are Geese the tip of some kind of classic four-piece garage rock revival spear? I don’t know about these zeitgeist questions, but it seems, lowkey, that they might be. This is their third album, and upon getting this into my soul through my ear holes, I went back to the other albums, which just don’t pack a punch like Getting Killed surely and firmly does. That’s okay… They’re a very young group of people, and although this might be a large load to put on them, maybe they’ll save us all.
“I’ve got half a mind / To just pay for the lobotomy / And tell ’em get rid of the bad times / And get rid of the good times too / I’ve got no more thinking to do”
It’s a full five out of five stars, ten out of ten, an A++ for me, and is THE album of the year. Get on the bandwagon, amigos, ’cause this is for reals.
