Cascadia Calling, 2025.10.27
"had I just said something if I wasn't polite stuck out my hand grabbed it and ran"
It was an appropriately gloomy and blustery weekend in the Intermountain West. A friend of mine was part of a troupe putting on a circus-themed haunted house. Always up for both supporting my friends’ artistic endeavors and taking a flier on some weird art, I gave it a look. The whole thing was well-produced. There was dancing, immersive theater, and aerial performances. The only part I found particularly spooky was the small child of about 10 years old who, upon seeing me, strode over, looked up at me, and let out an extremely convincing cat’s hiss.
Of all the different ways that music can be subjectively “bad”, the strangest lies in the uncanny valley of things that were clearly meant for me but that I hate anyway. Every time I hear a song that has all my favorite genre and style cues and yet still sucks, I feel like I’m in a shitty relationship. I can’t tell if it’s you or me that’s broken, but at least one of us clearly is.
This is how I feel about every Geese song. I am clearly in the demographic and aesthetic target audience for it, and yet I would rather listen to a chorus of literal geese than this cobbled together mess of a song. I like noise! I like incoherent screaming! I even don’t mind incomprehensible mumbling as a vocal aesthetic. But in this meandering mess of a tune, none of them is enough to make me actually enjoy the experience of listening.
Listening to either 3D Country (which “Mysterious Love” appeared on) or their new record Getting Killed, I felt like I could like Geese if they ever put together a cohesive song. Instead, each one seemed to pack a collection of random hooks and frenetic tonal shifts into a three minute package. The tracks don’t develop or express anything. They just start, wander through a few flailing aesthetic changes, and then stop whenever the band gets bored.
We’re living in a golden era for folks who like their pop music fuzzy and energetic. Alvvays, hailing from Prince Edward Island, are fine purveyors of the genre. The upbeat, punk-tinged “Pomeranian Spinster” is my favorite tune of their latest album, 2022’s Blue Rev. (You’ll forgive me for not discussing their music sooner, despite a discography spanning back over a decade, I’ve only just discovered Alvvays.)
Blue Rev as a whole is a great record. From the Smiths-like “After the Earthquake” to the fuzzy, confident “Pomeranian Spinster”, it’s got remarkable range. It’s also got the kind of depth that rewards extensive relistening. It seems like every time I do, I come away with a new-found love for a different track. Just working on this column, I started getting mildly obsessed with the strutting, synthy “Very Online Guy”. The maximalist reverb puts me in mind of the excesses of the 80s in the best way.
It’s an interesting side note that my other favorite pop band that I discovered this year, Wet Leg, also hails from a sparsely-populated island in the Atlantic. I’m calling my shot and looking forward to the next high-energy pop powerhouse to come from Tristan da Cunha.