Cameron Winter of the New York band Geese went solo on Heavy Metal, co-produced by drummer and composer Loren Humphrey. The album presents a unique musical persona backed by a dramatic vocal quality and homespun aural choreography. The lyrical style has a stream-of-consciousness quality – absurdist, comic and often meta. Musically, the album references a variety of staples from sunshine pop and soul, the ballads of Randy Newman and Warren Zevon, echoes of Van Morrison’s free-form folk and baroque-pop orchestration amongst other things. Winter pioneers an entirely new approach to the roots-rock singer-songwriter format that began with Bob Dylan in the 1960s that is simultaneously old-fashioned in genre but deconstructive in the way each track is stylised by unorthodox arrangement and singing choices. The songs are heavily arranged but retain a loose and irreverent atmosphere, simultaneously baroque and patchwork-like achieving a musical version of abstract expressionism.
His warbling and dynamic register colours the two catchiest tracks – the sunshine soul of Nausicaa with a call-and response gospel melody and the sprightly, childish Love Takes Miles with ragtime piano and driving rhythm. On the other hand, Rolling Stones and Nina + the Field of Cops (a tribute to Nina Simone) emphasise the lyrical rambling on a shapeless instrumental background. The former, drawled by Winter against a gentle nylon-string guitar motif, street-folk percussion and baroque touches. The latter, on a bed of hammering piano notes which creates a breathless Bolero-like quality (perhaps the best arrangement). His vocal acrobatics (which may sound as much like Jim Morrison as Van Morrison) alone can imbue pathos into the skeletal and anemic ballads such as the Zevon-esque 0$ which ends with the surrealist proclamation “God is actually real, I’m not kidding this time” and especially the spacey and depressed Drinking Age (perhaps the peak of pathos) – almost Waitsian in the way it inhabits character. The acoustic waltz of Cancer of the Skull evokes early Cohen but Winter’s meandering melodic recitation highlights a neurotic rather than intellectual quality. The romantic Try As I May is Dylan-like but as if performed in slow motion and deconstructed to just a plodding electronic beat, organ and dissonant layering. We’re Thinking the Same Thing with tense staccato rhythms is an esoteric country ballad. The album finishes on the most melodic track, Can’t Keep Anything, which also evokes Dylan with organ and acoustic guitar but the chorus is sung in a strained half-falsetto, which contains esoteric lyrics like “begging and praying, you used up your knees” and “dying and dying, you used up your grave”.
The album is a patchwork of absurd musical and lyrical motifs that also boast an unusual emotional quality. Winters is no Gen-Z Bob Dylan and he certainly lacks the poetic intensity of a Joanna Newsom or the storytelling quality of a Springsteen or Zevon but what he shares with all is a unique musical charisma that can animate even the most insignificant of sentiments with universal feeling. Winter’s skill is similar to many great songwriters in that he can evoke the writers of the past while remaining entirely original. The approach to arrangement is the most ‘modern’ characteristic in its use of baroque and digital manipulations that aim less at melody than at atmosphere and which propagate lyrical and vocal expressionism.
Label: Partisan Records
Released: December 6, 2024
Losing My Edge Rating: 8/10
Best Tracks: Drinking Age, Nina + the Field of Cops, Love Takes Miles