Psyops or not, I plant myself on those Roman Colosseum steps at the Forest stage to watch Geese do whatever it is Geese does to people. I’m surprised the place isn’t wall-to-wall—turns out a big chunk of the Osheaga crowd would rather be somewhere shouting along to Twenty One Pilots, which, fine — that’s a choice a person can make… Might be the wrong one, but c’est la vie.
Still, Cameron Winter and Co. have a magnetic energy to them, slowly pulling other members of the crowd and me into the Forest stage slough during the opener “Husbands,” as a silver projection of the word GEESE rotates to the pull of the earth—or the young rock group’s chemistry meszmer.
Winter’s voice sounds like he’s making a pact with the devil—morphing between a dissonant growl and an angelic falsetto— and he carries himself with just enough slacker indifference to make the whole thing feel dangerous in a good way. I’ve had Getting Killed on repeat basically all year, so I knew the goose was going to be loose live, but nothing prepared me for what they do to “Cobra” or “Half Real” onstage — the songs get pulled apart, vocals and instruments going feral, until nothing’s recognizable anymore, right up until Winter waves the band to hit the all-knowing crescendo. At one point, he just plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” off his phone, mid-set, no explanation, before slamming into the bridge of “2122” off 3D Country. — just the madness of rock’n’roll.
“I thought we had five minutes left, turns out we’ve got twenty,” Winter laughs, before easing into “Au Pays du Cocaine” and that bright, arresting little guitar riff. Someone in the crowd screams “PLAY TAXES,” and Winter, obliging as ever, lets the band tear into their little opus on human malaise. They close with “Trinidad,” Winter ad-libbing some nonsense from his ever-expanding personal lexicon before screaming “there’s a bomb in my car” over and over, like some pendulum that’s lost its mind and can’t stop swinging. Psyops or not — Geese has got the stuff.
Photos by Benoit Rousseau
