The opening track, “Trinidad,” is a bewildering listen. The irregular 13/8 meter, along with the discordant blasts of horns and keys, isn’t sonically pleasant.
Cameron Winter’s vocals and lyrics also work to unsettle the listener, with repeated chants of the line: “There’s a bomb in my car,” followed by a description of sons, daughters, wives and husbands being in various states of disarray. “Trinidad” is hardly an enjoyable song, but it is distinct.
The rest of the songs on the album never get as strange or off-putting as the opener, but they very rarely end up in standard song structures. The lead single for the project, “Taxes,” sounds more like an extended jam, constantly building in a linear fashion with no choruses or bridges, than like the standard indie-rock fare.
“Au Pays du Cocaine,” a favorite of mine, comes close to a standard verse-chorus structure, with the repeated chorus lines of “Like a sailor in a big green boat / Like a sailor in a big green coat / You can be free,” but, even here, the song is more linear-jam anything else.
It should be hardly necessary to say that much of modern pop music is in a dire state. The new Taylor Swift album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” has been met with a lukewarm, or at times hostile, critical response. Sabrina Carpenter’s newest project was met with a more mixed reaction than her 2024 album “Short N Sweet.”
There is an abundance of very boring, very formulaic songs that are being released. “Ordinary,” by Alex Warren, has little to say and little to give in terms of musicality, and it has made its home on the Billboard Hot 100 very comfortably.
Geese cut through the polished corporate-music landscape and deliver an album that never lets you know what’s coming next.
Winter’s lyrics are full of metaphor and symbolism, his vocal performance imbuing them with a kind of otherworldliness that is difficult to describe. When I first heard “Trinidad,” it was the first song I heard on an otherwise cold Friday morning, and the only thought going through my head was: “I can’t believe someone let them make this.” I fell in love with the rest of the album the moment I heard it.
Whether you’re dancing with the cobras or crying over the freedom of a sailor with a green boat and a green coat, “Getting Killed” has something for you, and, if you don’t like the song you’re listening to, at least you’ll never be able to say that it wasn’t interesting.
