THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR
In Casablanca, Victor Laszlo drowns out a Nazi anthem with a stirring tavern rendition of “La Marseillaise.” God, he’s so fucking serious. His right arm keeps furious time and his eyes shimmer at Ingrid Bergman like he’s just now this exact moment winning the war. Of course, it’s 1941 and 50 million more people must be starved and slaughtered before actual victory arrives for…um…it says here…the good guys? Nevertheless, Laszlo’s overweening expression will be familiar to anyone who’s ever rebuked fascism with a devastating social media post. That’ll learn ’em.
I’m tempted to say fuck protest music. A thousand Chilean guitarists play “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz” in the streets of Santiago. Folks in Hong Kong belt out “Do You Hear The People Sing” from Le Miz so frequently the Chinese government blocks it from streaming services. What changes? Pete Seeger and Sam Cooke and Joan Baez. Woody Guthrie singing “All You Fascists Bound To Lose.” But are they? What goddamn good, when a government makes evil sport of destroying lives. Nowadays “protest music” is a TikTok star putting out a call for civility 24 literal hours after Charlie Kirk’s murder. (“No one should get killed / No blood should be spilled / Charlie shouldn’t have died.”) Nowadays you and I quip and whine on an oligarch’s microblog website, or publish our lyrical discontents on a different oligarch’s musician-starvation machine. We’re all Victor Laszlo’s furious right arm, beating vehemently, touching nothing.
In depraved times, then, maybe best merely to reflect the madness.
Geese’s new album called Getting Killed, released Friday, isn’t a protest and it sure isn’t serious. A dervish of funk beats and time changes and lovely melodies and yelling, Getting Killed was recorded in 10 days in Los Angeles, where I live, during the most recent wildfires that reminded us exactly how tenuous all American lives are. Nearly everyone reading this is one bad break away from some variety of ruin. Health insurance won’t save you. Cops won’t save you. Religion might give you some pretty words, but as this crazy Geese album’s closing track “Long Island City Here I Come” would have it:
I told poor Joan
“You’ve been talking to You-Know-Who
And if you can talk to Him, you can talk to me, too”
And Joan of Arc, she warned
“The Lord has a lot of friends
In the end
He’ll probably forget he’s met you before”
Or as lead singer Cameron Winter says in a different song: “Doctor, heal yourself.” It’s up to us.
This album is great and it’s unhinged. It sounds loose and jammy, with ass-shaking grooves and random trumpet and saxophone bleats. It can verge on noise-jazz then immediately give you a pure drop of sunshine like the second half of “Taxes,” which would be the radio hit if radio existed. Sometimes there are arena-style drums and the big riffs rock music is supposed to have, and sometimes there’s the sample of a Ukrainian choir. Winter has a giant tenor that can hold a note when he wants but he’s a truly strange singer, elongating words where you wouldn’t expect, warbling like a lounge lizard at odd moments, and withholding meaning as you wait for the previous vowel sound to resolve into the next stanza, which often turns out hilarious. I should say: this isn’t usually necessarily my thing! I’m not a freak for experimental stuff. I mean, listen, it’s still rock music, it’s not damn Javanese gamelan. But as musicians, the members of Geese are definitely playing with conventions. “100 Horses” is funk that insists “all people must go dancing / out on the dance floors,” but then seems to slow down just enough in the middle to make it undanceable. On “Half Real,” they’re doing the Geese version of a ballad but refuse climactic catharsis. “Bow Down” is jazz-rock until it isn’t, and then the handclaps start up, and it is again. I don’t know, man.
And I haven’t even gotten to the lyrics. Geese aren’t trying to solve shit. They aren’t really directly addressing shit. Often Winter just seems to be saying whatever comes into his mind in the moment, and it’s funny. “Yeah there’s a horse on my back / And I may be stomped flat / But my loneliness is gone.” Okay, buddy! Also, though, in the middle of the opener “Trinidad,” which starts out with Winter’s falsetto sounding a little like Thom Yorke, suddenly the chorus comes and Winter repeatedly shouts, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” In “Half Real,” he sings:
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”
In “Taxes,” he admits, “I should burn in hell,” but immediately contrasts his sinfulness with his current circumstances, which belong to all of us: “But I don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.” And the title track diagnoses: “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.” None of this comes across as doomerism. It’s more like gallows humor. Somehow the combination of wild loose motley song structures and un-bitter irony captures Our Current Moment of helpless stupidity better than any music I’ve heard during Trump 2. Getting Killed is a manic mess, and so is the world.
I love this record. I’m also fascinated by its reception. Once upon a time, I wrote a novel about a rock band, one theme of which was the death of the rock band. My characters came along too late to experience the spoils of “the business” as they used to exist…and this was set in 2016! The real-life musicians I followed around back then couldn’t understand why the dreams of stardom—or at least financial solvency—that seemed so possible a few years before now eluded them and most everyone they knew, and obviously the rock biz has only gotten bleaker and more fragmented since then. There probably is no zeitgeist anymore, but if there is, new rock songs aren’t in it. I got an advance of Getting Killed a couple weeks ago and it sounded big and weird and to the extent I “get” it now, it took a bunch of listens. It wasn’t easy. It didn’t sound like a thing that would break through.
But it kind of has? Geese got a huge writeup in GQ, a 9.0 Pitchfork review, a thinkpiece in The Atlantic (okay, it’s just a review, but isn’t everything in The Atlantic a thinkpiece?), and more ecstatic appraisals than you can shake a stick at. If something as pedestrian as a rock band can feel ubiquitous in 2025, last week Geese felt kind of ubiquitous. They are kids. (Sorry. If you were born in the 2000s, you’re young enough to be my children.) On their label debut, Projector, recorded while they were still in high school, they sounded like they wanted to be the biggest band in the world, which is to say: like a Strokes knockoff. The 2023 follow-up, 3D Country, was a step up because now they were doing Led Zeppelin rip-offs, too. Okay, that’s not fair…once I internalized Getting Killed, going back and re-experiencing 3D Country reveals proto-weirdness that didn’t stick with me a couple years ago. But Getting Killed feels like the first time Geese isn’t trying to directly please us with their influences and thereby become the 2020s version of huge. And thus, through laws of irony, they are, in fact, becoming the 2020s version of huge.
I understand part of it. For instance, I understand—from afar, as my own generational footprints get eroded by the tide—why a certain kind of Zoomer would be ready not for sermons, not for bubblegum, but rather for something desperate and funny. In his warbly way, Winter acknowledges, “There is only dance music in times of war,” which means he knows he’s in a time of war. And later he also sings:
Maria cried out to me,
“You can either leave
Or you can stop playing that cowbell with your gun”
The kids this country has been hurting their entire lives can use someone who understands their impotent anger and defense mechanisms, a lot more than they can use an old dude striking up the national anthem.
But something’s also weird about Getting Killed’s
reception. The reviews I linked to above include outlets you’d expect, like Consequence
Of Sound and Stereogum.
Heck, it even makes sense The Guardian would clock this record’s pain
management via laughing gas. But The Wall
Street Journal? (They do say, “Mr. Winter’s vocal approach is highly
idiosyncratic and not for everybody,” which is probably true most of
all for readers of The Wall Street Journal.) And the Financial Times,
whose album reviews just before Geese were for esoteric jazz supergroup Trio Of Bloom and a recapitulation of the 1956 musical My Fair
Lady? Well, these aren’t the folks you’d think would seek the pulse of kids
who are exhausted, kids who are disappointed, kids who don’t believe in
deliverance…at least not the kind of deliverance that comes via business or
government.
Which means what? That this “most 2025” album of 2025 is prodding
something real and deep that even the suits can feel? That it’s hard to control
a demographic who looks at our current self-inflicted disasters and can only
shrug and laugh? And so maybe it’s also a low-risk gambit? Give the young wackjobs in Geese a little more exposure, an extra taste of
the good stuff. After all, capital subsumes all critiques into itself, right?
Fill the Geese kids up with a sense of their own importance, and then maybe
next time they’ll start singing strident prescriptions for a lost world after
all. Nobody listens to those.