(Credits: Far Out / Adam Powell)
Modernity has robbed us of a crucial musical relationship. The relationship you build with an album, when you have no other choice but to sit with it for an extended period of time.
In the “good ol’ days”, my monthly budget would maybe treasure the purchase of one record, which I would subsequently sit with for the remainder of those weeks to learn its intimacies. That record would become either loved or loathed, but either way, I would know how I feel without it being some form of transactional experience.
Now, with skip buttons, curated playlists and generally an endless supply of music at hand, I feel almost more disconnected from the product. It’s part of the reason this job gives me so much joy. Reviewing records provides a dedicated space to our much needed experience of musical excavation, to ingest art in far less of a transactional nature than modern society has influenced.
Those moments feel all the more special when the album in question is one that feels uniquely important to culture, an album that you can tell will be continually reviewed by generations to come. This year, I got to experience that with Geese’s third record, Getting Killed. A triumphant offering from the band who have refreshed the landscape of alt-rock through the record and have provided me with something that I have continued to exist with ever since.
Trying to keep faithful to the experience, I have played it through the entire track listing since its release, in different scenarios. Either blasting out of my speakers while cooking or accompanying me through headphones in the calm of a morning walk, it existed within the realms of my day-to-day and through that I’ve explored all of its corners.
Perhaps what is most interesting and bizarrely contradictory to my overall point is that through listening to it, I constantly hear a myriad of references from so many other records I love. The texture of Radiohead à la In Rainbows, the vocal charisma of an early Jim Morrison and of course the New York spirit of The Strokes.
It’s immediately clear when you listen to Getting Killed, or any Geese or Cameron Winter record for that matter, that the product has been carefully shaped by a catalogue of iconic records that have come before and have somehow been coherently bundled into one contemporary record. The splices of music that I have found otherwise disconnected have instead been stitched together to help make sense of it all.
So, it’s no surprise that the band’s leader, Cameron Winter, has an almost superhuman ability to digest music en masse. After being challenged to listen to an album a day for five years, Winter obliged and has now admitted to having “listened to more than 3,000 albums.”
Bizarrely, Geese have stepped forward as the band music fans are hoping will salvage a desperately digitalised and disillusioned music scene. Their ambitious albums, guerrilla gigs, and unimpressed demeanour feel inherently refreshing, yet the process in which they got there is an obvious byproduct of mass digitalisation. Truthfully, I don’t know how I feel about it.
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