Honk Honk!!! Who's There?

A crappy rock band called Geese. That's who.

I bring them up because a) the other day we were having a discussion of the rampant mediocrity of too much contemporary pop music and a little earlier b) we were having some fun at the expense of World's Most Irksome Rock Critic Amanda Petrusich of the New Yorker.

And then I discovered a new Petrusich essay on Geese that a) effortlessly demonstrated the inter-relation between the two themes and b) justified my 2021 characterization of Petrusich as the kind of deeply sensitive soul who underlines passages in slim volumes of poetry and then writes "How true!" in the margins.

To wit: From the December 15, 2025 issue. [All emphases mine -- S.S.]

Even “Taxes,” possibly the most euphoric song on [Geese's new album] "Getting Killed", is both darkly funny (“If you want me to pay my taxes / You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down”) and just dark (“Doctor, doctor, heal yourself / And I will break my own heart / I will break my own heart from now on”). These songs lean heavily on the marvel of [lead singer Cameron] Winter’s voice...

Ah yes, as you can hear in the clip above, it's the marvel of Winter's voice fer sure. Wow -- I can't think of a singer in the entire history of pop recordings who has such a uniquely expressive vocal quality.

...and on the drummer, Max Bassin, who plays with enormous restraint but a great deal of emotion. (The percussion on “Husbands,” one of my favorite tracks of the year, is slinky, nervous, weird, perfect.)

Oh yeah -- that drummer's playing is SOOOO emotional and perfect. Keith Moon? Never heard of him. 😎

Let's reiterate -- the marvel of the singer's voice, and the slinky, perfect percussion of the drummer. Right.

Oh, okay, but forgetting those, why is this obviously lousy band so great?

Petrusich again:

There’s a base level of melancholy and loneliness to everything Winter writes, which might have to do with the state of the modern world, or perhaps with the time during which he came of age. Winter, who is twenty-three, had recently turned eighteen when the COVID pandemic hit New York. In an appearance on the video series “A View from a Bridge,” in which guests stand outside and tell a story into a red telephone, Winter spoke about buying a virtual-reality headset during that tenuous, gruesome spring. He started messing around on a V.R. chat, and one day found himself on a Russian server set at a gas station in Siberia. He came upon two lovers in the snow. “Something about that was very tragic,” he said. “It was a very human moment and I think about it all the time.” It is possible that “Getting Killed” and its predecessor, “3D Country,” from 2023, are the first two great works of COVID-era music—not so much in their evocation of the events themselves but in the way the pandemic’s contours of isolation and fear seem to have shaped Winter’s consciousness at such a crucial moment in his life.

Wow. The COVID generation. Let's really hear it for them, ladies and germs.

I mean, the Boomers had the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, the fight against Jim Crow, the murders of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, the killings at Kent State, the struggle for Gay Liberation and the nightmare of the AIDS epidemic to deal with. And yet somehow they managed to muddle through and become Yuppie assholes. 😎😎

But COVID -- wow again. Those kids just can't seem to recover from the soul-killing anguish of having to wear masks on the subway for a year.

Seriously, how do you say "what a load of bullshit" in Yiddish?