Dramatic and swaggeringly different - a crazed cauldron of anger, tenderness, the strangely eccentric, surreal and psychedelic, the Brooklyn band’s latest is an experimental odyssey of garage riffs to Ukrainian choir samples, frenzied drumming and prog riffing, with lullabies to explosive mayhem topped by wonderfully weird, wailing and yearning vocals of Cameron Winter. Winter’s acclaimed solo album last winter, Heavy Metal, was a gentler affair, and nothing like its title, while this album far noisier and busier, but no less eccentric, and packed with gnomic, lyrics, opaque declarations, encounters and reference to historical figures from Joan of Arc to Adam Smith or angels, and freewheeling, mercurial sounds, from the intimate-to-explosive opener Trinidad, which veers from whispers to screams, noodling guitars and bursts of brass, to the tremendous climax of the closer Long Island City Here I Come, opening with a rather appropriate line: “Nobody knows where they're going except me”. And that’s the joy of this extraordinary record produced by Kenny Beats - it sounds shambolic and out of control, but there seems a joyous, freewheeling method and certaintly in its madness. So then, in between, there’s the catchy groove of Cobra or Islands of Men, the downbeat, lo-fi Husbands, or the full-on 70s rock of the tremendous title track. Particular other highlights are Taxes, which breaks wonderfully in to its warm, uplifting second half, the striking Beefheart-eque, galloping and anarchic 100 Horses, with typically strange lyrics (“All people must smile in times of war … All people must go dancing / Out on the dancing floors / There were 100 horses dancing / Maybe 124 / All the horses must go dancing / There is only dance music in times of war”); the tender, piano-infused love song Half Real: or the rolling beats and guitar riffs of Bow Down: “ I was a sailor, and now I'm a boat … I was a car, and now I'm the road … / And I was kneeling down on the turnpike/ With an angel down my throat / She said "You don't know what it's like/ To bow down down down to Maria's dead bones.” Captain Beefheart, Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits, Strokes and much more might have a few echoes here, but Geese really are a unique band, and this is their best and most strikingly original yet. Out on Partisan Records / Play It Again Sam.
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