Through and through, I am a skeptic. I consider myself, as my dad says, a “professional music listener”. I have spent thousands of hours flipping through the radio stations in my car, so I can comfortably say I know many, if not most songs and bands in the history of popular music (mostly rock). And I comb through these thousands of hours and thousands of songs, longing to find something unique, a gem in the sand. I like many bands, but there are only a few that I love, that truly speak to me.
On Nov. 8, I found a new one.
Geese, formed in 2016 in Brooklyn, released their fourth album, Getting Killed, in late September of this year. And wow, what a fitting title, because this album killed me.
I have known about Geese for a month now. SiriusXMU, an alternative music station on SiriusXM, has been playing “Taxes” off of Getting Killed with some frequency, but I only really started paying attention when I heard “100 Horses” for the first time.
“100 Horses” is a horrifying remark on human ruthlessness, that trait which makes us more animal than human. Cameron Winter, Geese’s singer and lyricist, both sings and writes in an extremely particular way, and it’s that particularity that is undoubtedly my favorite thing about Geese and “100 Horses”.
“All the horses must go dancing
There is only dance music in times of war”
When I heard this song, Winter yelling horribly about smiling and dancing against the band’s backdrop of blood and guns like a drummer drumming his way into battle, I understood that he was saying something I have been looking for the words to express for years. War is, by its very definition, unintelligent. It is a mass emotion felt by the sons and daughters of our toddler nations which throw tantrums that shake the earth. You would think we would have found a better answer by now. The truth is, I don’t think we want to. We bask in it, our victories, our triumphs, our trumpets. We write songs in honor of it. We forget the idiocy of running into battle once we have won it.
“General Smith told me
I would never smile again
He said that I would never smile again
But not to worry
For all people stop smiling
Once they get what they’ve been begging for”
And so I spent a couple of weeks sitting on this egg that Geese laid in my mind. My dad and I took a road trip to Neskowin, Ore. on Nov. 8 to go see a beached whale, which gave us hours to kill. I decided to put on Getting Killed, not quite knowing what to expect.
The album opens with a song called “Trinidad”. From the first note, the album is ominous and threatening. Emily Green, the guitarist, takes a retro approach, layering the guitar tracks with hints of disco and psychedelia that almost give it a bluesy feel. Winter starts out by singing softly:
“I tried
I tried
I tried so hard
But I tried”
And then something interesting happens and he starts screaming, as is somewhat commonplace on this album:
“There’s a bomb in my car!”
At this point, the rest of the band also collapses into insanity.
I can’t find anywhere online that draws this comparison, but Getting Killed reminds me very much of fellow New York band Swans. It must be Winter’s contributions that cause me to think this way, as Geese’s songs don’t share the same musical harshness of Swans, nor the song length that sometimes exceeds 20 minutes. But there is a similar lyrical approach, and the way those lyrics are expressed lead me to a similar conclusion that I get when listening to Swans, which is that there is violence everywhere, and that violence is an inherent characteristic of humanity.
Winter’s lyricism also reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s writing. Cormac McCarthy was an American author who wrote bloody and gruesome tales about the West, including No Country For Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian. I’ve been trying to read Blood Meridian for several months now, but I keep getting sidetracked, either because of the busyness of senior year or because the novel is too graphic and honestly just makes me feel bad about everything. The book is written fantastically because it’s so visceral. It is one of the most physical books I’ve ever read. And that physicality is a comment on violence, on man’s infinite inclination towards it, and the infinite battle to break away from that instinct, to become a higher being that lives quietly.
Winter was born in 2002, meaning he was only 14 years old when he formed Geese and 19 when their first album came out. He cites music monoliths Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan as influences, both of whom are some of the greatest lyricists to ever live. I find it incredible that someone as young as Winter can have such a clear impression of the world and be able to express it in such a concentrated way.
The second track, “Cobra”, contains no screaming and is a somewhat pleasant song if you don’t look at the lyrics:
“Baby, you should be ashamed
You should be shame’s only daughter”
“Husbands” assumes a threatening tone fitting of its lyrics:
“Will it wash your hair clean
When your husbands all die?”
“There’s a horse on my back
And I may be stomped flat
But my loneliness is gone”
I don’t like to look up analyses of song lyrics because not only do I think I’m somewhat capable of coming up with meaning on my own but also because I often don’t want my impressions to be ruined. That being said, this song is warlike. It seems to me like the dreary sister of “100 Horses”.
The titular song is the fourth track on the album. It opens with the band’s rowdy combustion and a chorus singing (almost yelling) in the background. Winter’s narrator sounds broken and delusional, as is the lens of most of the album:
“I’m getting killed by a pretty good life”
This song also contains a good deal of profanity, which I think adds to the effectiveness of Winter’s lyricism. Of course, I cannot write that here, but I encourage you to go examine it yourself.
Much of Winter’s lyricism feels somewhat angelic. I can’t exactly say why this is, but it could be because he assumes a sort of removed position from his subjects. Most of the songs where he is singing to a “you” sound like this, including the fifth track “Islands of Men”:
“You can’t keep running away from what is real and what is fake”
He is lecturing someone, pointing out their flaws. Moreover, he realizes there is a higher state of being that can be achieved, but not by “you”, by someone else, because “you” are fatally imperfect. But this only works because Winter portrays himself as fatally imperfect too. He realizes that he is going to hell, but so are “you”, and there is nothing that could save him or “you” from that fate.
The next song is “100 Horses”, followed by “Half Real”, which again feels angelic. “Half Real” is a terribly sad love song, the narrator again delusional and broken:
“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”
Winter’s vocals on this track feel so emotional. I think it is some of his best singing on the album. His singing style, which is not at all conventional, feels like a real human being. My dad said he sounds like “an angry farmer”, which is an excellent way of putting it. This sounds like a very old settler’s song, written hundreds of years ago, sung drunkenly at a bar. What could possibly be more human than that?
For much of my first listen of this album, my dad and I were discussing the future of art in a world of artificial intelligence. I stand firm in my belief that AI could never conquer art because humans deserve and demand humanity. We can tell who is one of us and who isn’t — maybe not on Instagram through reels and pictures, but when someone is singing to you, can’t you see their reflection in it? If you can’t see that reflection, there is simply nothing there. “Half Real” is a mirror — it is the clearest reflection of humanity I have seen in music in a very long time. The human condition is one of pain and suffering, but all horrible things must come from love, and to feel pain is to say that there was once love where that pain is now. And so we must feel love and thus feel pain in response in order to feel at all. Thus, we must feel forever — we must feel to be human, we must demand to be human and to feel.
“Au Pays du Cocaine”, or The Land of Cocaine, is, to me, the most heartbreaking song on Getting Killed. Winter expresses a desperation that feels so hopeless and naive:
“You can be free and still come home…
Baby, you can change and still choose me…
You can be free
Just come home, please”
Winter’s narrator is beyond saving. This song sounds like it is speaking to someone who is not only not listening, but has been gone for a very long time and will never come back. If you take nothing else from this, this song is worth listening to.
“Bow Down” is violent and explicitly religious. Winter sounds angry, assuming a condescending and accusatory tone that again reminds me of Swans’ Michael Gira:
“She said, I’ve met angels so deep undercover
That they sit on Solomon’s throne”
The following track, “Taxes”, contains more religious themes:
“If you want me to pay my taxes
You better come over with a crucifix
You’re gonna have to nail me down”
I like “Taxes” much more after hearing the full album than I did hearing it on its own on the radio. It fits in so well with the album. Winter’s final refrain in the song, “I will break my own heart from now on”, feels satisfying and glorious, like he has come to some great conclusion that has shed light on everything. This song, to me, fits best with the album cover, which of course warrants mention.
The album cover is a silhouette of someone standing in front of the sun with a trumpet, pointing a gun directly at the viewer. I had to look closely to actually figure out what was going on, but it is a very fitting cover for the album. The cover contains those themes of war, the glory of the trumpets and violence of the gun. But present too, in the sun, is acceptance, which occurs over the 45 minute span of the album.
“Long Island City Here I Come”, the closing track, is the completion of this acceptance. Winter opens with a naive remark:
“Nobody knows where they’re going except me”
He documents a lifelong conversation with historical figures, each revealing further truths and lies about human existence, and returns to berating the condemned “you” in relation to it all. The song, with a runtime of six minutes, 37 seconds, builds up gradually. The drums establish a great deal of tension as they beat incessantly to the tune of Winter’s refrains until the end, when the acceptance is met:
“I have no idea where I’m going
Here I come”
Getting Killed is a march through war and pain and suffering that demands the listener keep their eyes wide open. I am guilty; I too put the book down when it gets too hard to stomach. We so frequently turn the television off when they show the blood of war and stop listening when the radio talks of politics. Getting Killed is a warning of the consequences we will face if we don’t pay attention.
