by Harrison Knight (@_harrysawn_)
Cameron Winter, frontman of the New York rock band Geese, has made his solo debut as solo as possible. On the cover of Heavy Metal, a close-up image of Winter’s tired face is only slightly occluded by two silver chains. For each track, Winter released videos of himself performing the songs alone in public, isolated from the urban atmosphere by his studio headphones. On his website, a tab called “Portraits” is exactly that—a collection of pencil drawings of his face like rough drafts of the cover photo, some of them accurate and others almost animalistic. His solo live shows have been completely stripped back to only him, his voice, and his piano.
It’s fitting that a solo debut should be as singular as Heavy Metal. These songs shift and swell while hardly resorting to the clearest structural breaks of pop songwriting like key changes or startling tempo shifts. Instead, the songs maintain their basic components and invite new instruments, sounds, and voices into the fold, such that each four-ish minute segment is a process of accumulation. On “Cancer of the Skull”, a repeating phrase on acoustic guitar fitting of Leonard Cohen collects a mouth harp, a wandering piano line, and an array of horns, all played slightly out of time. It’s song construction by way of palimpsest, layering elements on top of each other rather than attempting to fit them together.
The best analog I’ve landed on for this process is Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Much like Astral Weeks, Heavy Metal’s driving force and binding agent that keeps this collage on the canvas is the voice. Crooning, warbling, mumbling, and yelping, Winter discovers, discards, and rediscovers melodies across each track in spite of the instrumentation’s forward momentum, as if voice and music are on two different planes, watching each other from a distance. Winter’s lyrics are not improvisational. They’re very carefully written, more carefully than almost any indie record released in the past few years. In their tumbling performance, however, they sound like the emphatic stream of an exhausted consciousness—a consciousness exhausted mostly by a changing sense of self.
The impulse behind this solo debut’s focus on individuality is not self-obsession but self-discovery at a particular time in life—22—when self-discovery feels artificially accelerated. The fourth song, “Drinking Age,” gets closest to making this explicit: “Today I met who I’m gonna be / For the rest of my life / And he’s a piece of shit.” One day you cannot legally drink alcohol, the next you can, onward to the end; Winter looks at the adult he has suddenly become and doesn’t love what he sees. On the rest of the album, he sings of discomfort in expensive clothes and makes his body (“long-armed and knuckle-scraping”) sound like that of a recently evolved Homo habilis if the first tool it discovered was a grand piano. Winter is frustrated by his own uncontrollable evolution.
Maybe that’s why the songs on Heavy Metal grope around in the dark for sources of meaning, although the strongest sources are the easiest to find: love, God, and money. Sounding warily optimistic on “Nausicaa (Love Will Be Revealed),” Winter unloads almost his full sheath of self-contained vocal FX. Beginning in a near whisper, he finds himself in a cracking, over-sharing vibrato and ends up yelping the song title through. Immediately after, on the album’s poppiest and peppiest song “Love Takes Miles,” love is revealed to also take years, to be inconvenient, to be controlling, and to require, as its precondition, loneliness. At other points, like on the album’s sole single, “$0,” the revelation comes out of contradiction. Self-identifying as a “zero dollar man” for much of the track, Winter ultimately declares that “God is real, I’m not kidding God is actually real.” It’s a moment that in another song would likely make me wince, but Winter’s absolute, brazen sincerity makes it stick. The instrumental epilogue that closes the track is its own revelation, as if to say “God is real and I’ve found him in this perfect piano riff.” Music itself is obviously Winter’s fourth source of meaning, and almost certainly the most effective.
A central image of the album, and a helpful idea for understanding it, is walking. On “Love Takes Miles,” the miles are trekked on foot, “Lonely as hell / walking around / without moving.” Walking feels less like an act than like a stand-in for change, for time passing, and, at its best, for growth. As each song wanders around its melodic backbone, it sometimes sounds like Winter is wandering around the Guitar Centers where the record was supposedly recorded, picking up whatever catches his eye and adding its sound to the music. The final track, “Can’t Keep Anything,” seems to question those miles walked for love: “Walking and walking / you used up your feet.” Even after all of the revelations of the record, the final one is of the right kind of solitude, realizing that in a romantic or perhaps in an artistic relationship, “I can’t just give everything away / to you.” Winter, even while joined by a lover and a tattered copy of the American songbook, walks alone.