by Will Bishop
Once, ten thousand years ago, when I was a very small child living in the rolling grassy hills of Loleta, I saw a flock of geese passing overhead. Delighted, enthused, filled with the kind of special joy only someone existing in the liminal space between being just born and the wayward era of toddlerism — I cried out, “Gee, gee!” Then, when the geese were gone from my side, I lamented, “No mo’ gee.” This was one of the first documented cases of me being happy, and one of the first documented cases of me being sad. This joy and this sadness — this particular kind of joy, of soaring euphoria and boundless optimism, of seeing birds and having no fucking idea what they are but delighting in their unbounded freedom — their patterned triangular synchronicity against a stark white sky. This particular kind of sadness, of loving something you’ve never known, and being crushed when it leaves you. This is what Getting Killed feels like.
Getting Killed is the fourth studio album, their third under Partisan Records, from Brooklyn based rock band Geese — a band that’s been on a meteoric rise following the breakout successes of their own 3D Country, and frontman Cameron Winter’s debut solo LP Heavy Metal. A rarified modern example of a genuinely explosive rock band — their recent free concert in Brooklyn Banker’s Anchor filled the streets with hundreds in attendance. They exist as living proof that there is, in fact, a future and a place for innovative rock music in the current landscape. Not a tribute act, not a taxidermied emotionless golem sent to vengefully remind people that this genre once held the highest seat of power in the music kingdom. Not a shadow, but a new light. The flash of a gun, rather than the bloodied aftermath.
Barrelling out the gate with the chaotic meandering screed Trinidad, Cameron Winter describes a person in shambles. A perilous being too far gone to recover, reducing themself to a final act of extremity, “There’s a BOMB IN MY CAR!” Winter screams. Much of the album is about a lost and nebulous love — for a person, for a world, for a way of life, it’s almost interchangeable. It’s about reactions to pain, coping, creating meaning.
Things we feel forced to do, corners we’re backed into, solutions we scramble to create. Lose your ears, use your eyes, lose your eyes, use — oh hell, who cares anymore. It’s about breaking free, no matter the cost. He refers to his wife, and his husband. The protagonist isn’t one person, more an archetype of modern ennui. A saint that’s lost its patience. A living reaction to a society where each of us are forced to negotiate perpetually with a cold and indifferent face. Where your sorrows are not seen, and it feels like all you can do is break down and burn.
Winter is a lyricist who takes you deep down. With a baritone like a diving bell and writing like that of the world’s happiest suicidal man, “Like a sailor in a big green boat, like a sailor in a big green coat. You can be free.” He has the unique ability to sink you very slowly to the most sunless reaches of the ocean. You can scarcely feel the pressure build until you’re surrounded by a swarm of layered harmonies, clanging percussion, and a single unchanging guitar line like a rope back to the surface – as seen in tracks like Husbands. Then, by some inverted miracle, you’re hurled back to the surface and beyond. The Spear of Longinus thrown into the heart of god. The woozy gospel of title track Getting Killed akin to getting the bends halfway through the Earth’s ozone layer. “I can’t even hear myself talk, I’m trying to talk over everybody in the world.”
It’s an album that contains the sounds of the past, conjuring to mind components of classic bands like Television, but not as some reanimated and zombified gestalt. Rather, it is as if the pieces have been reborn and forced to wander the modern world. By the grace of some divine thread finding their way back together, as if pushed by the isolating tendencies of their new environment, forever changed, yet always together. When I first heard Cobra, dancing alone in the night on a dark path, I felt for a brief moment that everything was completely as it should be. Everything in life turned to water and I was just one thing in a great stream, listening to a song I had heard a million times for the very first time. I was happy and I was sad. One single, lonely thing under a sky we all share. United in loneliness, getting killed every day and getting back up again. Someday, everything explodes. “Here I come.”
Will Bishop is a Cal Poly Humboldt journalism major. He is prone to writing essays about things that bother him, and fictional works about things that also bother him but in different ways. A highly bothered individual, and a lover of cinema, music, and large trees/rocks, he can often be found in the woods, dancing to bring down the sky.
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