If you’ve been searching for your album of the summer, look no further: Geese gave us 3D Country almost three years ago, and it’s standing the test of time (and the 80-degrees-windows-down-stereo-all-the-way-up check). If I’m being totally honest, I’m not sure I have the technical skill to go through the weeds of this record – I am no musician – but I can smell a damn good album from a mile away. And this one stank.
Originally released on June 23, 2023, 3D Country is the band’s second official record, and a testament to their skill. Between childhood friends – guitarists Emily Green and Foster Hudson (who has since left the group, which still remains a quartet today), drummer Max Bassin, bassist Dominic DiGesu, and vocalist and keyboardist Cameron Winter – it’s a miracle a group of New York City kids both found each other and made it together, especially at such a young age, as their sophomore album came when they were just 21. As a fellow 2002-er, I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing.
The album is a conglomeration of wailing confessions, screaming guitar, gospel refrains, chest-rattling drums, and just plain hooting and hollering. These are all characteristics, as I said, of a damn good record. Frontman Winter’s stellar lyrics tell tales of love, loss, adventure, religion, absurdity, and an overarching theme of apocalyptic doom and gloom. It’s a fun listen; one you can pinpoint all the influences in and see their own style and creativity flourish throughout. Geese have proven themselves to be a rather divisive group, as all good bands do (many people claim Winter’s signature warble to be infuriating and their rapid rise to fame to boil down to bandwagoning), but the amount of talent packed into this group of early-20-somethings is astounding.
As the group’s sound continues to evolve – any fan knows the stark differences between all three records – 3D Country remains the most mid-July, cold beer, camping-chair-garage-sitting, a-little-bit-strange-but-you’re-into-that, rock n’ roll album they’ve put out thus far. Let’s dive in.
Kicking it off with 2122, we are firstly introduced to Winter’s howling about various Armageddon-linked religious figures – from Balarama to Jörmungandr to Osiris – to a medley of instrumental howling, in its own right, backed by intensely powerful drumming from Bassin. This song has been likened to Led Zeppelin on several instances for its folkloric lyrical content (those guys sure did love the Pagans) and the give-and-take between the percussion and vocals. It’s certainly a choice to start with, one that shows the chaos that’s been pent up and meant to be released; it’s the first jam that takes us into the end times.
The band slows things down a little with the album’s title track, 3D Country, a twangy ballad that firstly establishes the necessary give-and-take between Winter and the gospel-style backup singers. Winter said in an interview with Rolling Stone that this song is about a straight-edged cowboy “who does psychedelics in the wild west and fries his brain forever.” Paired with a plunky guitar solo from Green, this is a taste of a The Rolling Stones-style lean into country honky-tonk that comes back repeatedly.
That idea is continued through Cowboy Nudes. This song is incredibly percussion heavy, though it still gives the other instrumentals time to breathe. Bassin’s drumming capabilities are on full display, bongos weaving in and out as Winter sings optimistically about the end of the world (“Honey kick off your pants, we’re living in the future”) all the way to an easily belt-able chorus: “Be my warrior! / My love and light,” coupled with some 70s-esque “chika-chika-chas.” The background singers haven’t left yet, either, with Winter responding to their refrain about climate change simply: “New York City – Underwater!”
I See Myself is definitely the sweetest love song on the record (“I’ve been hit by the bus of love / That falling brick of you”) and the meat of the lyrics is relatively simple for Winter’s standards – “I see myself in you.” The sound is reminiscent of Funkadelic, complete with a heavy emphasis on the chorus, jaunty guitar, and hefty bass from Green and DiGesu.
We take a break from the good times to revisit the apocalypse in Undoer. It’s darker now (“When the meteor falls / I will be with my own / I'll be eating them all”) with a more expansive sound, more akin to what we’ve heard in 2122. It ends big, as most Geese songs do, with a little bit of hellish screaming. My roommate once came into my room when I was listening to this song and told me to turn it off.
In its own way, Crusades is also apocalyptic – or at least the crusades were to any non-Christian, which is what the track is referring to. This one is more vocals-heavy and discusses a crusader on his one true mission from God: “Everybody is born bleeding / But in my armor, I am a man / I raise my fingers up through the ceiling / And you'll see my God, and you'll be born again.” There’s an orchestral string accompaniment to this song that adds a lot of texture – the drumline and guitar riffs are simpler, though fast-paced, matching Winter’s hasty declaration: “I get more faithful every fist I make / Men die but the devil is ageless / The Lord, he lifts me, every breath I take.”
This fatalistic nature plows into Gravity Blues. It’s about being tethered to the earth when things are hard, the inability to float away into the next life, and the desire to do so and have someone save you. “I won't do one more hour honey, I can't fight the rain / Please baby I need you and your hammer / Won't you break my chain?” Winter’s vocals are more pained, the background singers cry along with him in a more desperate manner. This song ends big, too, in its own style, with a layered, tinkling guitar, accompanied by slow and lazy drums from Bassin; it’s more hypnotically Beatles-esque than other songs on the record, spiraling and sparkling as it finds its way to the end.
The loud intensity of Undoer is matched by Mysterious Love. Winter screams of loneliness; the fear, the desire that comes in the first place to become completely known, and the gruesome exposé that’s irrevocably intertwined with that: “Bend me like the limbo / See my insides / This love is my only window (I will be the airbag) / Twenty pounds of glass in my eye.” There’s a tonal shift halfway through that blends the variety of style together. The instrumentals are powerful and driving – Green’s scratchy, pitchy guitar is coupled with powerful snare and cymbals. A lot of it is really nu-metal, very 90s (complete with a bit of spoken word), with a building severity before we reach the simple, yet poignant outro: “Some people are alone forever.”
Domoto highlights the range in sound that Geese can manage to cram into one track. We go back and forth between a fast-paced cycle of guitar, keyboard, and drums, to a slower ballad from Winter, seemingly referring to the evil nature of war. “A world of green men / And they don't know what sadness is / You have smelled this country's breath / You put children on your back.”
Though it sounds like a successor to Crusades, Tomorrow’s Crusades returns to the twangy country sound we first heard in 3D Country. This is my personal favorite. The lyrics are definitely more impressionistic and absurdist than other songs on the record, which makes it more interesting: “Finding the way out / Looking for your ass / Crawling on my hands and knees / Nobody breathe.” Winter’s vocal showcase – going from pitchy, garbled wailing to a coherent octave change – makes it have a certain amount of depth over top DiGesu’s bassline, which remains on the forefront otherwise. It builds, it releases, it does it again. There are more orchestral strings on this one that pair well with the percussions. It’s layered, it ends on a big note, it has a ton of little elements like hysterical laughing and cowbell involved (I’m thinking of Joe Walsh’s Life’s Been Good): really, it’s the perfect Geese song.
The record ends with St. Elmo. This is another heavily layered track – there’s a lot going on, it’s a fun one to sit down and try to catch all the details hidden within, especially at the end (a car horn and smashing glass, anyone?) The lyrics (mostly screamed or whined by Winter) recall the apocalyptic doom we’ve heard before, but this time, gives us someone to blame – likely the uber-rich politicians that will lead the planet to its untimely demise. The orchestral strings are not so orchestral, instead, they are jarring and scratchy, the bassline again emphasized among the drums. As Winter told Consequence, “We never learned this song at all, we just stitched it from overdubs and samples, and it ended up working out.” The band ended up switching instruments, allegedly, with Winter on bass, DiGesu on drums, etc. Perhaps that’s where the convoluted and disordered mess of sound comes from – and why it works so well. Described by one Perfectly Perfect user as a “drunken stumble to the finish line,” Geese does what they know best and round out the album with a big bang.
3D Country is, on the whole, a showcase of Geese’s developing and powerful sound. Between the four current members – Green, DiGesu, Bassin, and Winter – we are shown a central theme, a variety of genres with homages paid, a unique signature style, and one impressive vocal range from Winter. It’s one I’m looking forward to playing on my dad’s back porch this summer – the warm weather isn’t complete without a little bit of honky-tonk rock n’ roll. In the end, the album perhaps does prove GQ correct: “they may be Gen Z’s first great American rock band.”