Geese - Getting Killed
(Partisan - Play It Again Sam, 2025)
Consider the specter of “Exile on Main St.” entombed within crystalline carbon tetrachloride, alchemically transmuted through five and fifty orbits of the sun, accreting fragments of sonic grimoires, technomantic incantations, fury-wrought sigils, existential tremors, gallows mirth, and the soul-devouring terror that all roads lead either to nothing or everything. One must immolate this elixir, inhale its astral vapors, and then quench the eutection with gasoline to realize Geese's Getting Killed.
Through the marriage of traditional instrumentation and computational sorcery, threaded with cunning palindromes of sound, the band transmutes base elements into an auditory philosopher’s stone that defies all known taxonomies whilst maintaining perfect chronometric progress.
Cameron Winter permits no loose threads in this brilliant controlled chaos. The album’s introduction, “Trinidad,” emerges as a beautifully aberrant fusion—cabaret incantations seeping forth at morphine’s languid crawl, yet thunderous as revelation. “There’s a bomb in my car,” the oracle intones. Brass conjurations, serpentine loops, electric psalms and forge-born percussion circumscribe the fever-vision of Wilson Pickett and Chappell Roan’s impossible offspring, lost in MDMA’s ecstatic delirium. The titular hymn manifests as prophecy: what ritual Nirvana might have performed had they endured, conducted by Kurt Cobain’s headless corpse. “I can’t even taste my own tears.”
An arrhythmic pendulum propels the desolate “Islands of Men” as Winter weaves stratum upon stratum of existential dread, percussion dense as obsidian, each measure birthing new acoustic chimeras. It is fracture and tenderness, pandemonium rendered through deft conjuration into coherent incantation where none should exist—as if summoned by mere chance. “100 Horses” materializes amidst a Rorschach constellation of sound, wherein definite rhythm crystallizes from infinite probability.
“General Adams told me
‘Son, you were born to die scared’
So he said, ‘One day you will die scared
But not to worry
For all people must die scared or else die nervous.”
This utterance lingers bitter as wormwood upon the tongue of every sentient creature that draws breath in this fallen world.
Sonically, Getting Killed manifests as a brilliant miasma—disparate elements bound through forbidden geometries that should not cohere, yet achieve perfect synthesis. Abandon your antiquated notions of “good beats” conjured on obsolescent tablets in Sugar Hill’s shadow-chambers. Winter’s and Geese’s rhythms are plutonium-blessed, obscured beneath instrumental pandemonium, revealing themselves only to those who surrender wholly to its havoc.
This is nothing less than the dismantling of music to its skeletal framework and its resurrection through febrile imagination constrained by neither law nor convention.
For Alex Lankford, who knew that I would love this…
Breathtaking description. Definitely will check out! Thanks.