There are no rules in rock-and-roll, except for maybe these two: It is good for bands to be ambitious, and it is good for audiences to be skeptical of those ambitions. It’s been one of rock’s animating frictions across a 75-year transformation from ecstatic counterculture to corporatized mass culture to the slow-dying digital mystery culture that we struggle to make sense of today. There’s probably still plenty of meaning to be generated in that chasm between drive and doubt — but we barely feel it anymore because today’s bands aren’t very ambitious and today’s audiences aren’t very skeptical.
Now, if you haven’t already made their acquaintance, say hello to Geese, a striving young rock quartet from New York City whose breathlessly acclaimed new album, “Getting Killed,” has ambition leaking all over the place. So far, the band has been shrewd enough to play it all down, shielded by their large sunglasses and good taste. As for the world’s skepticism, more would be nice, but it’s hard to say how much. In the messy social media illusion that we call a discourse, both Geese fans and Geese haters seem to have overestimated each other’s zeal and headcount, yearning for an adversarial tension to help make their exhilarations and incredulities feel earned. Nobody wants to think of their fanning or hating as mere reflex. But this band is both good and overhyped, and the uneasiness everyone feels in the riptide becomes its own kind of investment.
And no band has occupied these crosscurrents so comfortably since the Strokes, a group to whom all parties are very tired of Geese being compared. Fine, compare them to Interpol, or to Vampire Weekend, or to any other 21st-century rock-shaped group in the perverse lineage of beautiful New Yorkers tasked with overcoming their own hype. The thing that distinguishes Geese from all of those other bands, even the Strokes, is that their music feels so broad, yet so personal, as if the band were siphoning a disproportionate magnitude of rock-and-roll history through their true human selves.
Which is to say that Geese sound like Stones rolling into the lobby of the Neutral Milk Hotel, or like Royal Trux doing Van Morrison karaoke, or like any other mix-match construction you can imagine involving the Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Can, Television, Pavement, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, Dirty Projectors and umpteen-dozen more. The band’s essential Gen Z-ness lies in their sweeping musical literacy, and when Geese singer-guitarist Cameron Winter towered onstage at a sold-out 9:30 Club in Washington earlier this month singing, “You can’t run away from what is real and what is fake,” the fundamental confidence in his oozing baritone signaled an ambition to take on the entire world and then some.
I wonder if I’d still feel that way if this great new American rock band was from, say, Muncie, Indiana. The members of Geese — Winter, drummer Max Bassin, bassist Dominic DiGesu and guitarist Emily Green — can’t change the fact that they grew up and formed their crew in New York City, but the froth piling up around “Getting Killed” can often feel like the latest reason for New Yorkers to feel good about themselves. Maybe this is real sicko stuff, getting hung up on how NYC reality reflexively assumes its position as universal truth, but so goes the weird communion of anxieties when ambition and skepticism collide.
A concert is a good place to shed doubts, though, and at 9:30 Club, these Geese were good, maybe even great. The spooky breadth of Winter’s voice made his lyrics feel like art (“All people must die scared or else just die nervous,” he moaned on “100 Horses”), and the entire band operated like a highly adept rhythm section — until a cover of “TV Eye” by the Stooges, which suddenly had the slimy, aerodynamic feel of a Grammy telecast tribute. Maybe these four are too good at their instruments for punk cosplay. When the band shifted into “Exile on Main St.” mode during the vague mangle-jangle of “Half Real,” the song felt aptly titled, more remote than cool. Nothing they did counted as scary or baffling, except after a fulminant encore performance of “Trinidad,” when Winter exited the stage screaming vaguely, “F— these people who live here!” Many assumed he was talking about the administration, but maybe he was upset about the catering. Art is subjective.
After the show, I lurked outside on the curb to see who funneled out, and it wasn’t exactly America’s youth. There were some teenagers, and I felt bad for them. First, for having to share their new favorite band with so many Xers. Second, for having a new favorite band that didn’t repel these older people in the first place. Meanwhile, sidewalk chatter from the 20-somethings seemed to bristle with anxious positivity. “Awesome!” “So sick!” “Amazing, right?” The tone of their voices felt as sticky inside my skull as Winter’s — the sound of young dudes trying to confirm that other young dudes had just witnessed a miracle that nobody felt quite sure about.
Then I snapped out of it. How dare I presuppose to understand what goes on inside bros’ minds? A state of not-knowing is where I should want to be, anyway. With their life-and-death lyricism and their heightened sense of rhythm, Geese had reminded me that I’d rather have a band dilute my skepticism than fail to meet the terms of a preconditioned bliss. Wondering whether this band matters feels better than knowing it.
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