<\/p>\n
On a recent Friday night, the indie-rock band Geese\u2014which formed in New York City in 2016, when its members were still a couple of years short of the legal driving age\u2014played the final date of its North American tour. The show, at the Brooklyn Paramount, a baroque nineteen-twenties movie house turned concert hall, was a jubilant homecoming. (Even Mr. Met was in attendance, paying respects, perhaps, after the band\u2019s bassist, Dominic DiGesu, told a reporter, \u201cIf there are going to be billionaires in the world, the Mets are the only thing worth funding, in my opinion.\u201d) In the months since Geese released its third studio album, \u201cGetting Killed,\u201d the band has been rhapsodically heralded as the redeemer of a certain kind of noisy, lawless rock and roll. Critics love making such breathless declarations, and fans love to scoff at them. But isn\u2019t controlled hysteria sort of the point? Geese itself is a dramatic outfit, prone to bursts of noise, meandering digressions, and feral bleating. Responding to this music with reason and reserve feels at odds, in some fundamental way, with its spirit.<\/p>\n
At the Paramount\u2014Friday was the second of two sold-out shows there\u2014Geese\u2019s front man, Cameron Winter, invited members of one of the opening bands onstage for an abbreviated cover of the Stooges\u2019 \u201cFun House,\u201d an almost eight-minute song, from 1970, about who knows what. (\u201cYeah, I came to play and I mean to play around \/ Yeah, I came to play and I mean to play real good.\u201d) \u201cPlease welcome horns and shit like that,\u201d Winter said, as the musicians ambled onstage. Geese is often compared to ambitious turn-of-the-millennium bands like Radiohead and the Strokes, but the Stooges might, in fact, be the most accurate analogue\u2014attitudinally, if not quite musically. There\u2019s a petulance to Geese, and especially to Winter, who has been known to mess around with journalists, fibbing, dodging questions, or giving deranged answers. (The band\u2019s apparent lack of interest in projecting sincerity, or in earnestly engaging with the press, also feels very millennium-coded to me: ironic detachment, writ large.) I have come to enjoy this about Geese. I do not necessarily need my hand held after an album\u2019s release, and Winter\u2019s indifference when it comes to annotating his songwriting creates a kind of pleasant friction with the emotional intensity of the music itself. When the band appeared on \u201cThe Zane Lowe Show\u201d recently, Winter responded to a question about the writing of \u201cHusbands,\u201d one of the album\u2019s best and most fraught songs, by saying, \u201cI don\u2019t remember,\u201d venturing only that it might have occurred near the Gowanus Canal, a famously putrid waterway in Brooklyn. \u201cYou know, a dolphin died in there last week\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. or something,\u201d Winter offered. He was wearing sunglasses inside.<\/p>\n
This approach works in part because \u201cGetting Killed\u201d is such a raw and unprotected art work. Winter is obviously someone who feels unusually deeply, even if he\u2019s not very interested in performing cathexis outside the studio. At the show, I caught myself involuntarily tearing up during \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine,\u201d a loose, heart-wrenching song that builds to a kind of transcendent climax. It\u2019s possible that the title is a warped allusion to Bruegel\u2019s \u201cHet Luilekkerland,\u201d an oil painting, from 1567, that depicts the psychic aftermath of sloth and\u00a0hedonism; \u201cHet Luilekkerland\u201d loosely translates to \u201cThe Land of Cockaigne,\u201d a mythical medieval wonderland in which all appetites, however deviant, are satiated. (In proper French, the phrase would be \u201cLe Pays de Cocagne.\u201d) The connection might feel like a stretch, if only the limits (and perils) of contentment weren\u2019t such a central theme in Winter\u2019s lyrics. As he sings on the album\u2019s title track, \u201cI\u2019m getting killed by a pretty good life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, it\u2019s hard to say precisely what \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d is about. Winter\u2019s vocals are pleading, as though he is begging someone not to leave: \u201cYou can stay with me and just pretend I\u2019m not there\u201d; \u201cYou can be free and still come home\u201d; \u201cBaby, you can change and still choose me.\u201d He sounds, to me, like a person in a faltering relationship trying to make whatever concessions are necessary to not get left. (Something about the song reminds me of an especially heartbreaking scene in the penultimate episode of \u201cMad Men,\u201d in which Betty Draper, after being given a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, tells her teen-age daughter, \u201cI\u2019ve learned to believe people when they tell you it\u2019s over. They don\u2019t want to say it, so it\u2019s usually the truth.\u201d) In the music video, Winter is seated at a dining table, singing to a baby. At the end, he walks upstairs, hoists himself into a 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 somewhat exacting detail in a 2024 memoir, \u201cMore.\u201d) At the Paramount, for whatever reason, the line that really got me is also one of the song\u2019s most inscrutable: \u201cLike a sailor in a big green boat.\u201d It\u2019s a meaningless image, which I suppose is central to its beauty\u2014the potential for projection. It inevitably makes me think of people I have lost, now adrift in some unknowable sea. Winter\u2019s voice, froggy and sad, filled the theatre. He played a leggy little guitar solo before the second verse. The tempo decelerated. I felt, briefly, as though something inside me was dissolving.<\/p>\n
Even \u201cTaxes,\u201d possibly the most euphoric song on \u201cGetting Killed,\u201d is both darkly funny (\u201cIf you want me to pay my taxes \/ You better come over with a crucifix \/ You\u2019re gonna have to nail me down\u201d) and just dark (\u201cDoctor, doctor, heal yourself \/ And I will break my own heart \/ I will break my own heart from now on\u201d). These songs lean heavily on the marvel of Winter\u2019s voice, wobbly and slurred, and on the drummer, Max Bassin, who plays with enormous restraint but a great deal of emotion. (The percussion on \u201cHusbands,\u201d one of my favorite tracks of the year, is slinky, nervous, weird, perfect.)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a base level of melancholy and loneliness to everything Winter writes, which might have to do with the state of the modern world, or perhaps with the time during which he came of age. Winter, who is twenty-three, had recently turned eighteen when the COVID<\/em> pandemic hit New York. In an appearance on the video series \u201cA View from a Bridge,\u201d in which guests stand outside and tell a story into a red telephone, Winter spoke about buying a virtual-reality headset during that tenuous, gruesome spring. He started messing around on a V.R. chat, and one day found himself on a Russian server set at a gas station in Siberia. He came upon two lovers in the snow. \u201cSomething about that was very tragic,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a very human moment and I think about it all the time.\u201d It is possible that \u201cGetting Killed\u201d and its predecessor, \u201c3D Country,\u201d from 2023, are the first two great works of COVID<\/em>-era music\u2014not so much in their evocation of the events themselves but in the way the pandemic\u2019s contours of isolation and fear seem to have shaped Winter\u2019s consciousness at such a crucial moment in his life.<\/p>\n In Brooklyn, Geese came back onstage for an encore. \u201cThis is the last show of the U.S. tour, which would make this the last song,\u201d Winter said. \u201cWe only thought it right to end this tour with a cover of Waylon Jennings, the legend who lives on in our hearts.\u201d The band began playing \u201cTrinidad,\u201d the track that opens \u201cGetting Killed.\u201d It is decidedly not a Waylon Jennings song, although I suppose it shares a kind of coarse outlaw ethos. \u201cI try,\u201d Winter moaned. The guitarist, Emily Green, played an antsy little riff. \u201cI try \/ I try so hard.\u201d Winter took a sharp breath. \u201cI try,\u201d he sang again, before leaning into the song\u2019s frantic, screamed refrain: \u201cThere\u2019s a bomb in my car!\u201d The crowd went nuts\u2014crowd-surfing, moshing, collapsing on itself. Lights flashed. There was a feeling of giddy, collective release. Green, still fiddling with a guitar pedal, was the last to leave the stage. The crowd filed from the theatre, dazed, satiated, the good kind of emptied out.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On a recent Friday night, the indie-rock band Geese\u2014which formed in New York City in 2016, when its members were still a couple of years short of the legal driving age\u2014played the final date of its North American tour. The show, at the Brooklyn Paramount, a baroque nineteen-twenties movie house turned concert hall, was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2192058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[423140,22008,23083,362131],"class_list":["post-2192057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-inverted","tag-magazine","tag-pop-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Will-Geese-Redeem-Noisy-Lawless-Rock-and-Roll.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2192057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2192059,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192057\/revisions\/2192059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2192058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2192057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2192057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2192057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}