Geese – “Getting Killed”
The dead-eyed procession of spittle-spewing “important” bands who spawned in 2015 and have subsequently infested the entirety of indie rock seem to be, for the first time, on the backburner in regards to independent music culture. Trace the decline, and the origin seems to rhyme alongside history in three neat little groups. The hacks — in our case, every mundane one-word band name (i.e. “Ductwork,” or “Civilians,” or “Nafta,” what have you) group comprised of Serious White People who learned Angus Young’s central lesson of volume = better a few years too late — have all burned out off the back of mediocre debuts and one-to-ones of their nearest competitor. Given the saturation of the scene, God knows there’d be plenty of wannabes. Van Halen resulted in Skid Row and Def Leppard, Eminem led to NF and Logic, and so on and so forth.
The second volley is the perfectly fine radio fillers. Middling isn’t the right word, but their revivalism (ref. Post-punk revivalism, the name of the genre; another formless designation that nonetheless emphasizes its utter mushiness) leans closer to necromancy. Just the idea of it can conjure the sound: repetitive bass, droning guitars, a lyricist rehashing Morrissey’s greatest hits in monotone like even he dislikes what he’s doing, like he’s amazed that anyone can find joy in this dreck. They dress loosely, play loosely; as if the most effort one should expend in a lifetime is constricting and loosening your own airways.
The last group had the good sense and varying talent to GTFO while the G was good. They jump like rats to many, many different ships: some swerve hard into another genre, usually depending on whichever member actually sets the band apart. It aligns neatly with the neighbors well-equipped to take the basic set-up of a post-punk group. Good bassist? Veer into dance and electronic. Good drummer? Go into prog; it worked well enough for Black Midi. Good guitarist? To the post-rock and noise mines with you. Few in this genre end up with good lyricists and frontmen, but that’s where it gets really interesting. The world is your oyster with a great lyricist at the helm.
New York City’s Geese have the good fortune to have all of these things, or at least enough of them to matter. At their head is Cameron Winter. You may know him from his signature dead-eyed gaze, his warbly vocals, and his stream-of-consciousness writing style that marries high-minded literary poeticism with abject stoner stupidity. Bassist Dominic DeGesu and drummer Max Bassin combine for a rock solid groove, bringing to mind classic rock pairings like Watts and Wyman or JPJ with Bonham, with Bassin especially having an increased presence in the band’s percussion heavy approach. Music is filled with contradictions, one of which being that the looser a band plays, the tighter they truly are. Geese are, potentially, the loosest band in rock.
My initial standout (and frequent flyer in my streaming this month) is their second single “100 Horses.” It’s a romp buoyed by DeGesu’s even bass work, letting Emily Green’s guitar bounce between arpeggios, stabbed notes, and subtle tremolo. It feels exactly like the album cover looks; like God’s own soared from Heaven to point a pistol at your melon. When the record decides to build like this, with Winter’s gospel-flavored rasp rambling over a soaring instrumental, it shows the talent for straightforward songwriting that no abstract band can work without.
The ending run — from the yearning and slouched “Au Pays Du Cocaine” to the explosive rush finish of “Long Island City Here I Come” — demonstrates one of the highest climbs in quality an album has had all year, if not the decade. Geese’s soundscapes and lyrics create this sort of addled concentration; the songs all illustrate difficult relationships, spiritual axe-grinding, and a Berman-or-Byrne-like gallows-joke paranoia. The dense and winding instrumentation feels muddled in the ear but miraculously clear in the brain.
“Bow Down” in this sequence is another highlight, featuring a quirky but skillful vocal performance by Winter overtop a piston-like drumbeat by Bassin that gives the entire track the drive of panicking breath. “Taxes,” immediately afterward uses a transcendent instrumental drop to compare paying the government to crucifixion and other torture.
That’s what tilts the record into a benchmark release, the new “obsession” propelling Geese to the realm of Black Midi, or The Strokes, or Joy Division, what have you. The iconic record “Getting Killed” has drawn comparisons to have attempted to use the sounds of the time to justify and comprehend incomprehensible environments. Joy Division painted with the palette of post-punk the desolate landscape of Manchester, a neoliberal hellscape where lives are cheaper than their value. Geese have transmogrified that same ethos into a new product: a record which captures the stagnation and paranoia of everyday American life through the lens of the music of the time.
When Winters on “100 Horse” waxes philosophical about wartime motivation to die with purpose, it’s not hard to draw comparisons to the language used to reopen the world after COVID, i.e. “one can die afraid or die with a purpose, doing something.” The entire record is sprinkled with moments like these, a rebuking of the confessional, straightforward, “tell me every detail” songwriting we’ve seen take rise in the 21st century. In a time where everyone seems to be selling you something, lying to your face through the gritted teeth of sincerity, or obfuscating the truth for their own benefit, here’s Geese. They have the gall to not lie to you about how insane they are, how insane the world is, and how insane we all are for not being as insane as them. Bravo.
Queens of the Stone Age – “Songs for the Deaf”
Jesus Christ, talk about an adrenaline rush. You wanna talk about revivalism? Everyone’s recreating post-punk nowadays, but in 2002, Josh Homme’s rock supergroup decided to revive the long-dead genre of “speeding rock.” One could arguably also call it “hard rock,” like every other music scholar covering American music, but then that’d require me to dull my sparkle, which I swore I’d do for no one.
I won’t patronize you like I’m showing you some hidden gem because I’m a college student with a RateYourMusic account, not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with 5,000 records, but I think few have fully dived into “Songs for the Deaf” like it deserves. I think anyone with two ears and an uncle in love with rock radio has heard “No One Knows” on the radio a few times; it’s borderline synonymous with “real rawk” radio stations that yearn for the blues to reenter the zeitgeist. Even past the record’s incredible (one could argue front-loaded) run from its opener to “The Sky Is Fallin’,” Josh Homme — trained on polka and forged in stoner metal — has an incandescent quality to his playing. This not to say he lights up a room; he gives every song the eerie flavor of a candle in a hallway or a torch in a cave. No track sounds sober, from the crank-loaded psychosis of “Six Shooter” to the heroin stomp of “God Is In The Radio.” He has this slippery, eel-like sleaze to his steel string skills. Previous guitar gods made love to their instruments; Homme sounds, in the words of Jello Biafra, “Too Drunk to F***” across the runtime.
From the staticky first minute of “Millionaire” that gives way to Dave Grohl’s neanderthal drum beat, one knows exactly the kind of thrill ride you’re in for. Sure, the whole thing is maybe, maybe, arguably, one step removed from Axe-slathered brochaco-core like Limp Bizkit. Hell, if Homme’s lyrics are anything to go by he may care more about the nookie than Durst has cared about anything. That’s the album’s secondary theme; if a song isn’t about getting high, it’s about getting laid. Don’t expect Dylan going in; the most “poetic” song in the tracklist is probably “Go With The Flow” and it’s still a glam rock headbanger with all the sexual subtlety of a neon-lit penis.
They really go for the glam, by the way, taking the throbbing riffs of T-Rex’s “20th Century Boy” or AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie” and dropping them a few semitones into neck-breaking headbangable territory. “The Sky Is Fallin’” achieves the kind of molasses-like sludgy sweetness parallel to contemporaries like Billy Corgan but with none of the trickery. It’s a textbook example of the kind of selfless guitar worship we go to rock for. The entire tracklist is insane riff after insane riff, from the fireman-pole-to-hell heavy sway of “Song For The Deaf” to the bash-your-brain-in repetition of “Six Shooter.”
This is, in its own way, a brutal revivalism akin to the Geese record, pulling the sounds of the past to explain the utterly desolate situation you find yourself in. But while Geese seem to be talking about some sort of great, societal, degenerative brainrot which has seeped into every corner, making everything and everyone deranged and warped, Queens of the Stone Age narrow their vision. They are describing to you one very specific derangement; five shots in, standing outside the bar, barely coherent enough to stand. Homme trades in the micro-apocalypse; the whole world may be rotting, but he’s still itching for a cig and the next high.
Graphics by Marty Alexeenko