Goose – Big Modern (2-LP Vinyl) Vinyl Record

Review

Goose just low-key dropped their London Calling, with a breakout album that breaks them out of the jamband cage most onlookers had up until now rightfully placed them in. Goose was supposed to be the band that saved the genre. And they still might be—at least in terms of ticket sales. But they also might now have their sights on something more unique, something to fully call their own. It’s something that speaks to the current era, complete with all the dystopian fears, dysfunctional communities, disconnected social networks, and distorted cultural divisions of latter-day times, taken with a hit of acid and the laugh-and-fall-apart detachment that is sacred creed of jamband heritage.

Big Modern! addresses the concerns of contemporary American life by flaunting the culprits and taunting the critics with a slick, heavily produced, AI-perfect album. The album has a handful of sterilized, radio-worthy songs: “Media,” “Good2Be,” or “Good Times / End Times” could seamlessly be sandwiched between tracks from The War on Drugs and LCD Soundsystem.

Of course, anyone paying attention will tell you that Goose didn’t really change their sound; they just refined it. Underneath the polish sits the same group of stoic, thousand-yard-stare kids just wanting a chance to try on their heroes’ shoes. The jams still search for peaks, finding them through the beautifully flawed human art of improvisation.

Goose have spent the better part of a decade building one of the most devoted live followings in rock, translating marathon improvisational sets into a fanbase that tracks setlists the way Deadheads once traded tapes. Big Modern finds them channeling that energy into tightly crafted studio territory, a reminder that the same band that stretches jams past the twenty-minute mark can also write a hook that sticks for weeks.

At times, Big Modern! sounds almost too perfect to be created by humans, even as it bemoans a certain loss of humanity in these harrowing times. That’s why it works. And then—amidst lyrics of binary coding and appearing in parenthetical titles reminiscent of computer language—are hidden jam-coded interludes and segues, even a jammed out reprise of sorts with “((nocturne))”.

And then there is the studio version of concert staple “SALT,” which clocks in here at 12:43. After a fake-out ending around three minutes in, Goose lets loose, building a legitimate jam to a legitimate peak.

In other words, don’t worry kids: nobody in Goose is about to rename themselves The Fly. But if we were still in that time period when physical albums were cherished objects capable of supporting identity moments for individual listeners while creating cultural movements for the masses, then Big Modern! could have provided a shared experience for college dorms across America; a future artifact from the time when Goose metamorphosed from the jamband upstarts that the neighbor’s kid couldn’t stop talking about to something big and modern; a product-of and an anathema-for these big modern times.

And in that way, Big Modern! is the sound of a band that has already made it within certain circles, announcing to everyone else that they have arrived.

Benjy Eisen - Relix.com