Geese’s Getting Killed is an album of and for our times. Reportedly recorded in just 10 days, it thrives on sharp edges, sudden turns, and a kind of half-broken beauty. This is a band that moves so fast that it sounds like the songs are inventing themselves as they go.
If Geese’s 2023 album 3D Country was an attempt at mapping out a grand narrative, with a full-throttle sound to boot, Getting Killed is far more impressionistic. It’s a fragmentary portrait of daily life as an endless street fight, where cruelty and tenderness are two sides of the same coin.
Opener “Trinidad” sets the album ablaze right from the get-go. Throughout the track, Cameron Winter and Emily Green’s jagged guitars collide with Max Bassin’s percussion, trumpet darting in and out like fireworks, while Winter howls about a bomb in his car until it feels less like a metaphor for everyday dread and more like a literal warning. Winter’s voice—sometimes a shriek, sometimes a deep bellow like a preacher ranting into the wind—keeps you off balance. His lyrics carry Bukowski-esque precision and spartan grit, and his deadpan delivery serves as the ideal vehicle for his emotionally blunt statements.
The band sounds at once locked-in and reckless, as if they’ve discovered how to weaponize sloppiness and sprawl into pure momentum, and the result is never anything less than thrilling. “Cobra” lets some tenderness seep in without softening the surrounding pandemonium, while the title track is a swaggering, funk-driven workout featuring a Ukrainian choir sample, pausing just long enough for Winter to confess, “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life/I have been fucking destroyed by the city tonight,” before spiraling back into another delirious freak-out.
Even at their most excessive and baroque—“100 Horses” rides militant repetition into a hypnotic frenzy, with guitars screaming and drums tumbling over themselves—Winter and company keep their wilder instincts grounded. These songs are meticulously constructed, their apparent disorder anchored by an exacting attention to texture, momentum, and tension.
Yet Getting Killed succeeds not by striving for flawlessness, but by insisting on feeling alive in the moment. Winter’s proclamations, yelps, and rallying cries on the showstopping closer “Long Island City Here I Come” are the sounds of a frontman daring his band to follow him into uncertainty. This is a thrilling, sometimes confounding album that has an energy all its own.
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