To be chosen by the muses will not be all the time a blessing. Inspiration can arrive as an iridescent butterfly or a dashing torrent, or, as within the music of Cameron Winter, it could possibly look and sound rather a lot like torture. “Songs are 100 ugly infants/I can’t feed,” the frontman of Brooklyn’s Geese laments close to the midpoint of his debut solo album, Heavy Steel. As Winter slips right into a falsetto on the phrase “infants,” there’s a stab of ache—considered one of many on the document, during which he takes a drill bit to the dual struggles of music and love, boring right down to their uncooked, nervy facilities. Bolstered by timeless preparations which are by turns folksy, soulful, and neo-classical, Winter establishes himself as a songwriter par excellence. However he’s additionally a reluctant one, a warrior-poet Achilles damaged down, “beat with ukuleles,” exhorted to take up his pen and aegis by forces far higher than himself. The result’s a undertaking of catharsis that by no means comes throughout like an train in self-importance, an outpouring of fabric as essential to its creator as it’s compelling to expertise.
One of many first issues to note about Heavy Steel, and maybe its defining characteristic, is Winter’s voice. Put largely in service of Zeppelin-esque theatrics on Geese’s 2023 document 3D Nation, it turns into a extra versatile and tender instrument right here, instantly outstanding for its sheer vary and depth of tone. Over the even-keeled strut of “Nausicäa (Love Will Be Revealed),” Winter alternately croons and yelps the identify of the titular Greek princess, infusing every syllable with need. And on the climax of “Ingesting Age,” a wrenchingly beautiful piano and woodwind ballad, it virtually feels like he’s melting: “Any further, that is who I’m gonna be/This fashion/A bit of meat.” That tune has Winter breaking out his signature batty lip burble—assume when a child stands proud their lips like a fish and runs their finger over them—as if he’s regressing to a more true, extra childish state. Or it may simply be the air leaving his lungs as he sinks to the underside of the bottle. Pitched someplace between Conor Oberst and Rufus Wainwright, Winter’s supply will not be “emo” however is very emotive, charged with a necessity to speak even within the moments the place phrases and language fail.
Because the phrases fall out of his mouth in an aphasic flood, it’s onerous to image Winter really committing Heavy Steel’s lyrics to paper, although they appear too exact on the web page to have emerged another means. With sufficient listens, the spray begins to cohere round sure motifs—horses, water, toes, sufficient “child”s and “mama”s to make Robert Plant blush—and, particularly, names. There’s the aforementioned Nausicäa, and on opening “The Rolling Stones,” two parallel martyr figures in John Hinckley Jr. (“with a sweet gun in direction of the president’s ass”) and late Stones guitarist Brian Jones, a member of the notorious “27 membership” (Winter himself is simply 22). After which there’s Nina. The one character with out a corresponding encyclopedia entry, she’s the express addressee of two songs—the endlessly escalating ”Nina + Discipline of Cops” and “$0,” the document’s solely single—and so uniquely, completely rendered as to immediately be a part of the pantheon of basic rock’s mononymic ladies, proper alongside Peg, Layla, and Angie.
