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At the end of last year, 23-year-old New Yorker Cameron Winter scored an industry hit with his solo debut Heavy Metal. The title was not indicative of its contents – this was a collection of droll, desolate dirges recalling the lugubrious greats (Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits) – yet Trinidad, the opener of his band Geese’s fourth album, actually does feature some metal-style screaming. What begins as an exercise in dreamlike, deconstructed soul soon erupts into a nightmarish cacophony of erratically parping brass, scrambled guitar and the shrieked refrain: “There’s a bomb in my car!”
Getting Killed ripples with a timely dread: a combination of sonic dissonance – 100 Horses’ ramshackle maximalism, the title track’s frantic pile-up of voices and grooves – and surreal, sardonic lyrics. (“All people must smile in times of war”; “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.”) Yet unease also stems from the creeping suspicion that these songs double as private jokes – Geese are school friends – and rock music itself is the butt of them: profundity is routinely undercut by silliness (“like a sailor in a big green coat, you can be free”) while gorgeous Van Morrison-esque melodies are delivered in a ludicrous warble.
Getting Killed can be opaque, but its brilliance is still obvious: the invention, the irreverence, the melodic knack, the swagger all great bands require. “If you want me to pay my taxes,” rasps Winter over falsetto backing vocals and syncopated drums, “You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down.” A sideways invocation of this era’s dark absurdity offset by the succour of a lovely classic rock melody; it’s Geese’s considerable appeal in a nutshell.
