Goose
Big Modern!
NO COINCIDENCE
Goose’s biggest detractors hate the band for their jam-grinding dynamics and the manner in which they take epically catchy, often jazzy melodies and fuck them all up. Good. Those who love Goose for those very same reasons can enjoy Big Modern! without having to explain every bit of it to these people, even if the Connecticut jam band’s latest album is a stretch toward something uniquely slick and end-timey. At once their most even-keeled, explosively hook-crowded album and their most esoterically whack (not as manically so as 2022’s Dripfield LP, but little is), Big Modern! is Goose’s Remain in Light, their move into limber, ’80s-centric dance music with a populist vibe.
Only rather than celebrate chicken-squawking David Byrne’s trance-inducing Afrocentricity with all of its diversely vexing rhythms and gospel positivity, guitarist-composer Rick Mitarotonda goes for brawny, boyish vocal prowess, sleek instrumentation, thick drums, and snide, conceptualist lyrics that are decidedly and unrelentingly apocalyptic on moments such as “Good Times // End Times” (maybe this is instead Goose’s Bemoan in Light). From the wound-as-one click of guitars and drums that fill its title track to the unified choral efforts and ponderous orchestration of “SALT” (the latter track a sensationally operatic work that takes its time getting through its near-13-minute frame) to the fizzy funk of “Good2B,” the end-is-near woe of its lyrics are belied by its don’t-stop-making-sense improvisations tightened for a taut musical and conceptual experience. Isn’t celebrating life and death the same thing? Isn’t all of that what made Talking Heads’ shift from art ensemble to gospel choir so exciting?
There are a few moments where Mitarotonda & Co.’s ponderousness becomes pretense, their sleekness tastes like saccharine, their yacht-rocking gets water-logged, and their big-ness is less modern than it is retro-pastiche. Still, I’d rather have a deeply cooking, sprightly synthesizing, and ever-experimenting Goose than a dead duck any day.
