Fluxblog 567: Geese vs The Grid

Plus a playlist of 25 late night jazz funk greats, and live show reports including David Byrne, Destroyer, The B-52's/Devo, and Stereolab.

This issue’s playlist is 25 Late Night Jazz Funk Greats. This is three hours of music mostly from the 70s, mostly fusion, mostly groovy, and all best heard at night. (Or, alternatively, on a rainy day.) It includes tracks by Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, Don Cherry, David Axelrod, Donald Byrd, and more. I’ve been crafting this one for a couple weeks and I’m very happy with how it came out – I think it’s one of the best playlists I’ve ever made.

🎷Spotify

🎺Apple

🥁YouTube

When That Light Turns Red I’m Driving Away

---

Geese “Trinidad”

The most striking and love-it-or-hate-it aspect of Geese’s third album Getting Killed is the way singer Cameron Winter and drummer Max Bassin both move between extremes of looseness and tightness, but not always in tandem.

Winter was already a fairly eccentric and emotive singer, but now he’s gone full bozo mode, leaning into his excesses with no trace of fear or shame. Bassin’s drumming is similarly flamboyant – sometimes he’s adding interesting detail to grooves that could be played a little more plainly and sound just fine, other times he’s frazzled and cacophonous, and mostly he’s so loose in his pocket that songs feel incredibly casual and impromptu. The rest of the band sorta swings between them, holding down their parts with unlikely grace while stuck between these guys who are like wild weather systems.

I’m pretty sure the looseness is a key reason Geese have broken through with this album, at least with critics and the cooler end of the indie rock audience. It makes them sound present and unpredictable, as if these often brilliant hooks are spontaneously occurring, and Winter’s clever lyrics are just sort of miraculously spilling out of him. This quality is the main thing they have in common with Pavement, but they don’t otherwise sound much like Pavement.

But they definitely have more in common with Pavement than most any notable band I can think of from the past two decades. This raw, organic feel – this sense that songs could collapse at any moment – is a million miles away from the often rigid and tight sounds of anything you’d call indie since the late 2000s. A lot of this is because so many artists were chasing more electronic or dialed-in aesthetics, but it’s mostly because almost everyone has been using some form of quantization in the studio. Everything has been made on grids.

Ezra Koenig was talking about this when he was promoting the most recent Vampire Weekend album Only God Was Above Us last year. I can’t recall where – it was most likely in an episode of his internet radio show Time Crisis. But he was saying that a lot of that record was produced with some desire to push against “the grid” – i.e., the way music appears in the interface of ProTools and other recording programs – and allow more unexpected and “wrong” sounds to break the symmetry. Vampire Weekend has always recorded to the grid, and it accounts for the tidiness of the sound, like the musical equivalent of Wes Anderson framing. You still get that on Only God Was Above Us, but that context and expectation only made the more abrasive elements on the record more striking. It was a good call, but it’s still a far cry from what Geese are up to on Getting Killed.

Getting Killed stands out in 2025 because it’s such a flagrant and brutal rejection of the grid and quantization. I’m sure it was also recorded on a grid because virtually everything is, and maybe there is some quantization going on in some spots. I haven’t seen the files! But however they got there, they sure sound like a real band playing in real time and plausibly like they’re all making it up on the spot. And they really throw the listener in the deep end right away by opening with “Trinidad,” a song that emphasizes their dynamic extremes. Relaxed, crazed, calm, panic. Winter screaming “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” like there’s actually a bomb in his car, Bassin bashing his kit like he’s trying to embody the explosion. It’s surreal, it’s scary, it’s a classic rock and roll thrill.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE

The Best Show 25th anniversary show at the Bell House! I’ve been listening to The Best Show for almost all of that time, and I can’t exaggerate the impact Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster have had on me, my sense of humor, and my relationship with language in that time. This show was a delight and featured Carl Newman, James Austin Johnson, Danny Tamberelli, Julie Klausner, Josh Gondelman, Sam Seder, Joe Mande, AP Mike, and more.

Destroyer with Cass McCombs at Knockdown Center. Very generous with the Rubies material in this performance! Midway through the show some guy shouted “WE LOVE YOU DAN” and Dan was completely expressionless, which amused me.

David Byrne at Radio City Music Hall. His new stage show takes the dancer-musician premise of American Utopia but pairs it with much cooler immersive image staging and a far better setlist featuring 10 Talking Heads bangers. That said, the new songs do get a little Sesame Street-ish? But there were a lot of little kids at this show, along with a little bit of every age group currently alive on Earth.

The Rapture and The Cribs at Brooklyn Steel. The Rapture’s power trio configuration really highlights how cool Luke Jenner is as a guitarist, a very underrated aspect of the band.

The B-52’s and Devo at Jones Beach - a delight to see these paragons of eccentricity and originality still bringing it deep into their 70s! Inspirational.

Stereolab with Memorials at Brooklyn Steel - blessed to see three songs from the god tier classic Emperor Tomato Ketchup in this set!