Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Very little of interest typically gets released in the December music industry doldrums. Press agents are tucked away neatly for the year, publications crow over the superiority of their year end lists, and if there is much of value that gets issued you’d almost rather not notice lest your year ends lists be fouled. But this year into that vast void Geese frontman Cameron Winter has cast a lopsided pearl–one that wobbles and weaves as it goes given its less than perfect shape, but in its many standout moments casts a dimly lit luster over the season’s darker days.
Geese itself is only two varied albums into their career, so it may seem an early moment for Winter to wander out on his own. But these compositions are decidedly not meant for full band production, though the best songs here carry more than a full load of power. Primarily driven by Winter’s heavy handed pounding of piano keys and stream of consciousness thoughts, he has crafted something that lands between the oft-promised, never-delivered final Tom Waits album and the lamented absence of Foxygen’s Sam France’s all-over-the-place vocal delivery.
Heavy Metal’s first three songs roll out as beautifully as anything else sequenced this year. The nylon-stringed intro of “The Rolling Stones” lends a suitable classic rock feel before giving way to Winter’s gravelly growled vocals. No idols are spared as the early lyric “Like Brian Jones, I was born to swim” puts the listener on notice that normalcy bears no value here, a concept cemented further a stanza along with “Like Hinckley’s son, I was born to dance / with a candy gun towards the president’s ass.” Skewed history lessons aside, the following “Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)” shares a title with a four-decades-old Miyazaki film and veers closest to Geese’s most recent work, background vocals and all. Closing out the trio, “Love Takes Miles” becomes a slyly powerful barroom sing-a-long over its too-brief course.
The more downcast “Drinking Age” disrupts the album’s early flow, while later on the nearly seven-minute-long lead single “$0” sprawls for sprawl’s sake, understandable for an artist that has no issues reveling in excess. Preceding “$0,” the assault of piano and horns that accompany the six-hundred-word apocalypse of “Nina in a Field of Cops” is where the album shines best. Winter’s full on “leave it all on the court” vocals match some of Waits’ finest larynx shredders, notably echoing “Down There by the Train” at warp speed. Amongst a long list of imagery some lines stand stark: “I safari across the neighbor’s yard / pushing groceries past pyramids of teeth / with my hands on my hips / O this idiot festival” or starker still Winter’s tongue-in-cheek call to “microwave everything.”
On the slower side, “Try as I May” works much better than “Drinking Age” as a ground out gospel shouter. And the pirouette of acoustic guitar, sax, piano and jaw harp that burble along throughout “Cancer of the Skull” make for a beautiful shamble. The song hides within it Heavy Metal’s title but has a crush all its own–more likely a reference to the ingredients of a chemotherapy infusion than the genre that powered the hair bands of old. “Cancer of the eighties / I was beat with ukuleles” sounds anything but whimsical delivered in Winter’s über serious slur.
Heavy Metal is a charmingly ramshackle affair, one which the press notes claim was recorded with musicians sourced off of Craigslist and put to tape in a series of Guitar Center sound rooms. As implausible as that sounds, the improbability of it leans into the album’s off-kilter energy. But from what means Heavy Metal came to be matters little. What does matter is that it’s here for the holidays.
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
Heavy Metal is out December 6th on Partisan.
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Mark Moody | @finelytunedsou1
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