New York City band Geese is set to play at Vancouver’s Hollywood Theatre on Oct. 25.Kyle Berger/Supplied
At the end of a wild, sold-out concert at Toronto’s Opera House on Saturday, the fog machines worked overtime as an off-key singer repeatedly screamed “There’s a bomb in my car” during a jazz-rock freakout called Trinidad. Through the mist, rushing past a young, frizzy-haired gentleman who had been dancing in the back of the venue all night, came a female security guard yelling, “Let me out.” As she disappeared through the front doors, the band never missed a beat, their electric guitars squalling as the bassist and drummer kept the rhythm fierce and loose.
As Jim Morrison used to say, “Weird scenes inside the gold mine.”
The concert had been a glorious 17-song uproar of post-punk, noisy funk, new junk, old junk − still rock ‘n’ roll to me. The boyish frontman with a woozy baritone murmured, mewled and yowled, proving that being close not only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, but in hitting the right notes too.
The band was pale, poignantly undernourished and clearly uncommitted to baseline grooming standards. They jammed, jazzed and rawked, with special attention paid to the material of their latest and greatest album, Getting Killed. A keytar made an appearance, of course.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the far-out Brooklyn outfit Geese, the best thing to hit indie rock since designer beard oil, and the most exciting new noise I’ve heard since the White Stripes rode 2003’s Elephant album and Broken Social Scene wrote Anthems for a Seventeen Year‐Old Girl.
That was more than 20 years ago, yet it feels longer. Time flies when you’re having fun, but we really haven’t been. Rock went stale. Geese changes that: These maximalists make rock fun again with an unpredictable, delirious, loud and danceable style. Time signatures are not standard. Guitar solos are brief but potent. Bursts of cathartic dissonance meet the groove head-on.
And young audiences are hip to the unapologetic weirdness.
“A lot has changed since the last time we were here,” singer/guitarist/songwriter Cameron Winter said early on to the crowd. True enough. The last time Geese was in Toronto was as the opening act for Australia’s King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard at Budweiser Stage on Aug. 21, 2024.
What’s good for the Gizzard is good for the Geese: You can expect the fast-rising New Yorkers to be headlining amphitheatres soon enough.
The summer of 2024 was the calm before the storm. Later that year, Winter released his critically acclaimed solo album, Heavy Metal. The record not only blew people’s minds, it sent music nerds scurrying back to Geese’s Projector from 2021 and 3D Country from 2023. In a sense, Winter’s Heavy Metal served as Geese’s breakthrough album.
The label debut Projector was an exercise in angular post-punk from a band that formed in 2016 while the members attended progressive college-prep institutions Brooklyn Friends School and Manhattan’s Little Red School House.
The two Geese albums that followed represent a freaky, algorithm-busting evolution that could be considered subversive in the cookie-cutter classic-rock world. At the 950-capacity Opera House, musical freak flags flew.
The dazed ballad Half Real was lovely, with its moments of falsetto vocals, but the lyrics were broken-hearted and blackly humorous: “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.”
At its heart, Gravity Blues was rough-cut R&B. I could imagine the Beatles performing it on the Apple Corps rooftop, though only if the whole band was as high as John Lennon. The slow-shuffling Husbands was shambolically groovy. The bruiser 2122 recalled the shenanigans of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion or the dark, sweaty drama of Nick Cave, before it shifted into psychedelic overdrive.
It’s a heady mix, by an uninhibited band who embrace a sensuous kind of chaos and a hurricane-eye’s freedom. We know it, simply, as joy.
Geese plays Vancouver’s Hollywood Theatre, Oct. 25.