Crimes of the mid-2010s cannot be exonerated as easily as this. Justin Bieber caused true chaos with his bone-crunching Baby, a hit which still sends shivers down the spine. Trust in Geese to honk through a cover of it. This is no joke. Well, it is. Nobody truly finds the lyrics within Baby strong enough to evoke further emotions. But it is equally untrue to expect immediate mockery. Geese try their hand at a song written off on arrival by those in the pop sphere because they identified it for the grift it was, but also because harsher times were tougher on young stars. Rebecca Black and Bieber both received death marches for appealing to an audience their age. Adults raged on, yet Geese found the love.
Deeper vocals from frontman Cameron Winter are expected but it is the genuine flourish, the heart in the words of a pop song stripped back into an interesting cover, which set alarm bells ringing. Did Bieber and his team have a lyrical hit on their hands? No. Geese has the instrumental conviction to mask the many weak moments of a song written to chart the heartbreak of a child. Bieber has moved along in the expected trajectory of a pop star who was some grim heartthrob and remains so for his listeners. Credit to Winters and company for proving intonation is everything in music. Perhaps it is why Talking Heads get along so well with their open-ended vocal work and the lyrical abyss. But there is some maddening flourish of heart and skill, as there is with this cover of Baby.
With only so much depth to the lyrics it is up to the guitar work throughout to carry the weight. It does not disappoint. Art rock at its finest, scrubbing the blemishes away from a riddled track of underwhelming quality. A miracle what you can do with sharp guitar riffs and a steady hand behind the growth of a song where most of the lyrical highs are vocal interjections and not actual words. Even then there is a slower swing which does much of the heavy lifting here, the love and heart of those opening bars becomes a convincing experience – one which would slide into the Geese discography as a novel yet genuine experience.
It is the latter, those moments of actual reflection on a track mocked relentlessly for a decade, which makes all the difference. Geese put real faith and soul into a song never meant for consumption beyond its immediacy in the charts. It has died off since then, thankfully, but Geese prove themselves as some of the hardest workers in music right now. Any genre, any period, they are some of the toughest and sharpest tools in the cultural arsenal. Winters and company bring out a real joy and worthwhile experience from a track likened to the scum of a toothbrush holder gathering damp and moss from splashes under a tap. Baby is finally worth listening to, it just took a collection of art rock masters to give it a shock country rock tone to get it there.
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