Every Record I Own - Day 872: Geese Getting Killed
This is a favorite of 2025.
I'm generally adverse to hype in the indie world. I don't think there's been a "hot" album in that sphere that I've enjoyed since The National's High Violet. Generally speaking, the more people are talking, the less likely I'm listening.
There was no shortage of discourse surrounding Geese in the final months of 2025. On the one hand, you had folks like Elton John and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth heaping praise on the young New York City band, celebrating their ability to make the often-cold world of art rock feel soulful and human. On the flip side, you had folks like my friends chalking them up as industry plants that sound like "a shitty Radiohead with white boy blues riffs."
Personally, I think Geese have arrived at a sound that's worthy of all the praise. I don't love every single song off Getting Killed, but the bulk of the album deserves all the accolades. My simplest assessment of Geese is that they sound like a New York proto-punk band from the late '60s / '70s taking a stab at the classic era of Rolling Stones. But even that description frequently falls apart. Hell, the first song on the album---the rowdy and ramshackle "Trinidad"---reminds me of the first track off This Heat's Deceit album... a tape-spliced collage of post-punk's jagged spikes and fits of contained rage. But then the album segues into the approachable balladry of "Cobra." The band has gone so far as to admit that the opening one-two punch was meant to establish the polarity of the album by putting the most abrasive track off the album next to their most digestible pop tune.
From there, the album zones in on a tighter spectrum of stylistic choices. Throughout Getting Killed, you're likely to pick up on a few key influences. There's certainly some Talking Heads worship in tracks like "Husbands," some stripped-down Television on "Islands of Men," some Velvet Underground peeking through songs like "Half Real"---but the more you listen to Getting Killed, the more reference points you're bound to hear, until you eventually realize that Geese don't really sound like anyone but themselves.
You can't really talk about Geese without talking about their singer Cameron Winter, a vocalist whose particular timbre, vibrato, and delivery looms so large that one's enjoyment of the band could easily boil down to whether or not you're buying what Winter is selling. Like some strange amalgam of Thom York and Tom Verlaine, Winter stretches cryptic lyrical snippets into strange proportions, dragging a loaded but ultimately curious statement like "all people in times of war must go down to circus" across multiple measures, disregarding any obvious cadence or rhythm, dragging it out so that every word becomes isolated and divorced from the larger statement. The band is equally elastic, with instruments dropping in and out of the mix, drum fills staggering the arrival of the next section, evolving verses, devolving choruses.
One gets the sense that, much like the Stones, Geese never play a song the same way twice. During their peak, The Rolling Stones would start writing songs when they arrived at the recording studio in the morning (or realistically, late afternoon, or midnight) and then burn through fifty takes until they captured the right feeling, even if that particular iteration of the song would never be recreated. There's a looseness to the songs on Getting Killed, as if the members are still trying out ideas, that harkens back to Mick and Keith circa '68-'71. And of course, there are a few classic rock blues riffs to be heard on songs like "Horses" and the title track that only reinforce that comparison.
To be fair, maybe we don't need a bunch of 23-year-olds reaching for the heights of the world's greatest rock band or harkening back to the endless cool of '70s NYC in 2025. But you know what? It felt pretty damn refreshing in the modern sea of modest bedroom pop, stoic reverb draped -gaze bands, poptimist carpetbaggers, and stoned everything-and-the-kitchen-sink appropriators. By the time the album arrives at the frantic piano and drum duel of "Long Island City Here I Come," you get the sense that Geese have opted to do the most polarizing thing they can think of in 2025---to be a confident, soulful rock band that doesn't reek of overt earnestness or formulaic marketability.
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