Looking ahead to Geese at Electric Picnic: "Rock music hasn’t sounded this good in years"

The streets of Paris’ Red Light District are heaving in the dusk. Moulin Rouge flickers behind a string of X-rated shops and neon-lit night clubs. It’s a compelling backdrop for Geese, the rock-band-du-jour, who’ve stormed the airwaves with their incredible third album, Getting Killed.

At five minutes to nine, we arrive at the threshold of La Cigale, where hoards of young people hold up posters saying, “Des billets?” [Any tickets?]. The sign on the door reads “Complet”, the venue sold out less than a day after the album’s release.

Getting Killed couldn’t have come at a better time, and many would agree that rock music hasn’t sounded this good in years. The record ripples with a timely dread and hellfire, squaring the fact that it’s a strange time to be alive. Most everybody seems to be reckoning with humanity’s voyage into the maw of decimation, a bloodied orchestra trying to vie against the tune of fascist and extremist conductors.

The apocalypse is the medium and the message of Getting Killed, and Geese may well be the arbiters of these times. Unsurprisingly, it’s an album that communes with the dead. Sure, the obvious ghosts are the predecessors Geese seem to draw from: Television, Can, The Strokes.

But perhaps Getting Killed’s most profound muse is that doomsday malaise. ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, the album’s closer, offers a pulverising requiem as Cameron Winter calls out to Buddy Holly. “You were there the day the music died,” he drawls. “I’ll be there the day it dies again.”

In this sweat-beaten concert hall, however, music is still very much alive. The lights dim and the audience erupts as Geese unceremoniously skulk on stage. Haloed by blue neon light, frontman Cameron Winter commands the room effortlessly. “I’ll repeat what I say, but I’ll never explain,” he drawls on ‘Husbands’, the show’s opening track. The tune is further ungirded by drummer Max Bassin’s supernova percussion and Emily Green’s sinewy guitar.

With title track ‘Getting Killed’, the first of many moshpits opens and, from there, the show zigzags between wild and woeful. ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ is delivered with raw, plaintive intensity as Winter harmonises with the audience.

‘100 Horses’ explodes in a frenzy of chicken-fried riffage and Dominic DiGesu’s throbbing basslines, as Winter affirms: “There is only dance music in times of war”. The air is buzzing by the time ‘Long Island City Here I Come’ rolls around. At the risk of sounding like a zealot, it’s perhaps the closest a song has felt to an exorcism in years.

I’m out of breath, telling myself I should be writing this down and remembering it – but I can’t shake the feeling that’s come over me. It’s a truly physical experience, a song of tortured ascension that builds to a beer-sloshing climax. My partner points out a grey-bearded rock veteran on the balcony, smiling and shaking his head in disbelief as if to say: “The kids are alright”.

Everyone is on their feet. No one wants to come down. Geese deliver a suitably uproarious finale with ‘Trinidad’, one of the most intense and uncompromising tunes from Getting Killed. Winter screams the refrain as the primordial sea of bodies swirls beneath him. By now, we’re all either covered in sweat or beer.

As the band exit stage-left and the lights return, people sit among the empty plastic cups on the floor to catch their breath, knowing they just witnessed something they’ll talk about for years. All in a day’s work.

Geese play Electric Picnic in Stradbally Hall, Co. Laois, on August 30.

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