Cameron Winter
Live at Carnegie Hall
PARTISAN
Cameron Winter’s solo music is to Geese what Marcel Duchamp was to the Dadaists: a gloriously artful, uniquely sincere (even at his trickiest and most disconcerting), haunted-and-haunting oddity in a sea of surrealists. Often played as a series of inside jokes with just himself, and with his low, wiggly baritone as his sole sounding board, Winter—on his 2024 full-length debut away from Geese, Heavy Metal—seemed like God’s lonely man, a pessimist beyond pessimists with a shockingly quicksilver sense of humor and an eye for detailed character study. When an obvious Winter influence such as Nick Cave calls your work “wigged-out,” you know you’re onto something troublingly terrific.
Those sentiments and details—in addition to the influences of Nick Drake and Kevin Ayers’ warbling, bittersweet poeticism topped by elements of madness and sadness—made quaintly into contagious pop songs, are what make Winter dangerous on scripted, cinematic captures such as “Emperor XIII in Shades” and romantic rhapsodies such as “Love Takes Miles” and “Try as I May.” No wonder Winter connected with director Paul Thomas Anderson in order to lens his piano-and-vocals-only live showcase from Carnegie Hall last year. Each artist traffics in long, languid tracking shots intercut with chunky scenes of vivid, jarring focus that come way too close to their already-mercurial subjects.
And as a work apart from Anderson’s colorful concert film, Winter’s Carnegie Hall live album still works as a marvelous still-life treat. Featuring beautiful, awkward songs from his already-spare Heavy Metal album (along with both tracks from his Singles EP, also from 2024), you can almost see the gawky songwriter ranting out the likes of “Nina + Field of Cops” and crooning through “Take It with You” with all the lonely, loving qualities he can muster up—be it for a crowd of thousands in New York City or an audience of one.
