The third studio album from the shape-shifting, Brooklyn-based experimental rock band,
Getting Killed
finds
Geese
at their most chaotic, delivering an assured yet jarring set of no-wave-tinged art-rock missives that are as unnerving as they are festering with earworm hooks and biting humor. Gen Z's superpower lies in its cultural immediacy -- a vast rolodex of influences ready to be summoned, ingested, dismissed, or argued over in the blink of an eye.
transcend the mile-wide/inch-deep results of so many of their genre-juggling contemporaries by tapping into the emotional malaise of the information age without succumbing to it. The band's kitchen-sink approach -- melding ebullient melodies and cryptic, yet oddly relatable lyrics with grooves drawn from soul, blues, funk, progressive rock, post-punk, and whatever else the algorithm tosses their way -- consistently sticks the landing. While rooted in the dual torments of existential angst and sociopolitical discord,
always feels like a party, with standout cuts like "Cobra," "Husbands," and Taxes" summoning both cynicism and fortitude, transforming its bleak undercurrents into something defiantly alive and weirdly cathartic. Even at their most belligerent -- the lumbering "Trinidad" and the
Strokes
-ian title track --
embrace the zeitgeist with youthful urgency and flickers of cautious hope, as frontman
Cameron Winter
tries his best to make the apocalypse danceable while channeling
Thom Yorke
on every depressant imaginable. ~ James Christopher Monger