On their latest album, “Getting Killed,” rock band Geese whirls listeners through 11 songs of clattering chaos. Released on Sept. 26, the band’s fourth studio album inspires in listeners a restless excitement for the future of American rock. Blending daring social commentary with casually heartbreaking confessional tracks, the Brooklyn rock band has emerged with a record that feels gloriously new.
Beyond their uncompromising collision of indie rock, punk, country and even jazz conventions, what makes Geese truly inimitable is the voice of their front man, Cameron Winter. The album’s obscure lyricism is amplified by the band’s not-so-secret weapon: Winter’s raw, unbridled wailing. In “Getting Killed,” Winter constructs a character battling through misery. His tone is irresistibly weird, and even his wordless vocalisations result in many of the album’s highlights.
“Getting Killed” begins with “Trinidad,” a track that functions as more of an artistic statement than a crowd-pleaser. Sultry electric guitar and hissing drums lure the listener in before the track erupts into distressed shouts of “there’s a bomb in my car!” By beginning with such disorienting maximalism, Geese makes it clear that “Getting Killed” will not cater to fair-weather audiences, daring the listener to stay and accept the band’s experimentation and volatility.
The album then swerves into a standout track titled “Cobra,” a deceptively jubilant song with instrumentation that twists the album’s overwhelming atmosphere of madness to a merrier key. The song’s lyrics reveal just enough vulnerability to convey a yearning for connection beneath his irreverence: “Baby let me dance away forever,” he sings on the track.
Each song in the album flows together in disorderly fashion, giving listeners whiplash with songs of anger, love and alienation. The production interweaves layers of intriguing samples — such as clipped conversations or Ukrainian choir singing — over consistently changing tempos. Their untamed sound is the product of collaborative improvisation as the band members give each other the room to be incredibly virtuosic. Long elaborate guitar riffs, incessant drumming and Winter’s howling vocal rhapsodies build a heartwrenching torrent of explosive passion.
On the title track “Getting Killed,” this frenzied energy is echoed in Winter’s cry that he is “getting killed by a pretty good life,” alluding to the album’s overarching themes of generational anxiety and American disillusionment. While Geese’s social commentary lends the band their lyrical genius, two of the album’s best songs are their most personal.
The confessional “Half Real” is an epic sonic meltdown over reverbed, swelling piano chords. Winter’s fragmented sentences sound like someone spluttering to an ex-lover through tears, while the chiming major thirds cruelly recall the sound of wedding bells.
Just when it feels like the album cannot get any more heartwrenching, this love song is followed by “Au Pays du Cocaine.” The whole song is one long aching crescendo that climaxes with an outpour of longing before Winter unconvincingly insists “I’m alright / It’s alright / It’s fine / I’m alright.”
The mysterious closing track, “Long Island City Here I Come,” ends the album with a jumble of allusions that manage to link Joan of Arc and Buddy Holly. The song culminates in a choir of wails and wordless shouts over rumbling drums as Winter declares himself “Charlamagne on the midnight bus.” His martyr-like catapult into the unknown feels both doomed and triumphant as he sings, “I have no idea where I’m going. Here I come.”
Rose Farman-Farma is a sophomore Comparative Literature concentrator from England who loves writing and music.
