At the end of last year, 23-year-old New Yorker Cameron Winter scored an industry hit with his solo debut Heavy Metal. The title was not indicative of its contents – this was a collection of droll, desolate dirges recalling the lugubrious greats (Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits) – yet Trinidad, the opener of his band Geese’s fourth album, actually does feature some metal-style screaming. What begins as an exercise in dreamlike, deconstructed soul soon erupts into a nightmarish cacophony of erratically parping brass, scrambled guitar and the shrieked refrain: “There’s a bomb in my car!”
Getting Killed ripples with a timely dread: a combination of sonic dissonance – 100 Horses’ ramshackle maximalism, the title track’s frantic pile-up of voices and grooves – and surreal, sardonic lyrics. (“All people must smile in times of war”; “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life.”) Yet unease also stems from the creeping suspicion that these songs double as private jokes – Geese are school friends – and rock music itself is the butt of them: profundity is routinely undercut by silliness (“like a sailor in a big green coat, you can be free”) while gorgeous Van Morrison-esque melodies are delivered in a ludicrous warble.
