New York's band
Geese, featuring singer-guitarist
Cameron Winter and guitarist Emily Green,
debuted with
Beautiful Memory (2018), a promising hodge-podge of
prog-rock (The Lake),
psych-rock (I Don't Want To Know),
pop balladry (Put My Hands On You),
1970s blues-rock (Always),
Bonzo-style musichall (Cherry Skies), etc.
Foster Hudson joined on rhythm guitar after the
unreleased four-song EP Bottomless Pink Lagoon (2019).
Less conceptual and more danceable,
Projector (2021) seemed to pay tribute to new-wave acts of the late 1970s:
Talking Heads (Rain Dance),
Sonic Youth (Exploding House),
Television (Fantasies / Survival),
and so on, eventually coalescing in the seven-minute litany Disco.
Another transformation occurred on
3D Country (2023), where they evoke
the Doobie Brothers in Cowboy Nudes,
Little Feat in 3D Country
and the Band in the stately Gravity Blues.
2122, instead, is reminiscent of southern boogie of the 1970s and a bit too similar to Led Zeppelin's Black Dog, despite the Gun Club-esque punk eruptions.
They seem incapable of capitalizing on the few original ideas, for example
the demented country-rock of Tomorrow's Crusades and the
angular funk-rock of Mysterious Love.
What is impressive is the lack of personality.
Foster Hudson left the band and
at the end of 2024 Winter released a solo album, Heavy Metal (2024).
The good news is that the sound of his solo album is completely different from the sound of his band.
There are moments when he sounds like a hybrid of
(a sober) Tom Waits and
Mark Lanegan, like in
The Rolling Stones.
He sounds like a somnolent Rufus Wainwright backed by an off-kilter gospel-ish choir in Nausicaa.
He evokes Randy Newman in the clownish fanfare of Cancer of the Skull.
The neurotic street singalong Nina + Field of Cops is almost David Peel-esque.
There are two piano ballads:
the gloomy and operatic Drinking Age
and the goofy $0 that becomes a choral drunk mess.
There is one mildly catchy and upbeat song, Love Takes Miles, which is sort of misleading.
Getting Killed (2025) indulges in
dejavu melodies and styles over original rhythms. We hear
Van Morrison in Cobra ,
Bob Dylan in Taxes,
Nick Cave in 100 Horses,
etc. The vocalist goes out of his way to sound more original than the average indie rocker but the real juice comes from the rhythm section that concocts the
dislocated boogie of Bow Down and the
neurotic gospel frenzy of Getting killed.
In 2026 it was revealed that they had hired an agency to create hundreds of fake social media accounts to manipulate algorithms on social media in their favor. Magazines that had ranked their albums among the best of the year had probably been victims of those algorithms.
