Attending hot-ticket shows in the great state of North Carolina is an ordeal for a number of reasons. From the get, there are only so many heavily populated areas that outta-town bands tend to circuit through; whether they end up hopping between college towns or touring through the more metropolitan cities, they always seem to book the towns least convenient for their Southern fans. For this reason, finding shows becomes more of a game of hypotheticals; are you lucky enough to find your hometown already on the list of tour stops, or will you be left to wonder if you coincidentally fall within a hundred-mile radius as any band you may have the need to see. But even when the stars align, even if everything lines up perfectly on paper, I can say for certain that the results never align in practice.
Friday, August 30, personal favorites and budding Tonitruale sweethearts, Geese, graced the enchanting hills of Asheville, NC, as the opening band on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's North American Tour. My frequent show companion, best friend and Tonitruale native, Liam Sheaffer, was also able to secure himself a short break from his civic responsibilities as an singer/songwriter/English teacher to moonlight as a freelance Tonitrualian and accompany me to the show. After a long work day, we saddled up with a set of Bojangles Cajun filet biscuits and began our perilous journey to the West.
For those unfamiliar with North Carolina geography (or for readers who never get tired of hearing me talk about it), my hometown of Charlotte is one of the southernmost cities in the state, marking it closer to the South Carolina border than the state capital. Luckily, the city is surrounded of several highway exits and interstates that allow quick and efficient travel between neighboring towns and cities (by which, of course, I mean there are two viable exits that lead everywhere that are horribly congested at any time between horridly late at night and painfully early in the morning). But getting out of the city is only the first hurdle. Once you hit I-85 and actually start making some headway towards Asheville and start really seeing the mountains, that's where the real test of patience begins; there's no greater challenge for a man than bumper to bumper rush hour traffic in what is basically the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Between unexpected slowdowns and almost driving over the mountainside to Kendrick Lamar's “Euphoria," music was played, laughs were shared, and setlist speculations were made, but we had yet to face our final challenge: Friday night parking in Downtown Asheville. We circled the area aimlessly in search of a glimmer of hope (or at least a bit of street parking); the bottom of the hour seemed to slip away at an alarming rate as we crawled closer to showtime.
Regretfully, Liam and I were forced to divide and conquer the pre-show, I hustled into Harrah's Cherokee Center to make the beginning of the set while he parked the car. I narrowly made it down to the bottom floor of the venue, leaving very little time to fully take in the contents of the audience, but enough to get a better grasp on the clientele the two performing bands were pulling in. It reeked like dab pen and a crème brulée Juul pod, and the concrete floor was already coated in a thick, sticky varnish of double IPA, all but cementing my shoes to the floor. The majority of the crowd was decked out in the King Gizzard shirts and hats from the merch stand upstairs, blending inconspicuously between the slew of shirts and memorabilia from tours past. The more involved fans were dressed appropriately for this special occasion, decked out in visibly homemade costumes inspired by the Gizz; robots, lizards, and of course, wizards. Also mixed in inconspicuously among the huddle of Gizz mascots was a kid filming and taking pictures of the stage on a Nintendo DSI.
Just as quickly as I'd arrived, the stage lights began to dim, replacing the harsh overhead strobes with a warm, translucent crimson glow as the band followed their respective tracks across the stage. “Hi everybody,” lead singer Cameron Winter grunted into the microphone, slinging his guitar strap over his shoulder. Geese kick-started their set as if they didn't have a single solitary second to waste (even though they started their 8PM set a minute or two early), taking the opportunity to debut a new live track, reportedly titled "Taxes," a song they've been mixing into their tour sets alongside "Islands of Men" and their cover of The Replacements' "Waitress in the Sky." Winter warbled and crooned into the wary gaggle of Gizzheads before them, “I should burn in hell, I should really burn in hell."
"Taxes" was an interesting new single, though hard to be taken seriously when it's backdropped by competitive stool dancing clips. The new single lies a similar vein as "Domoto" and "Islands of Men," relying less on the band's more impressive instrumentation and instead falling on simpler grooves and pockets, allowing Winter's vocal and lyricism to capture the listener's attention.
As "Taxes" rang out it's final chord, horns were immediately thrown up to replace the music in the air, accompanied by cheers, applause, and electronic dissonance from guitarist Emily Green's pedalboard. They let the amps sing for another split second before switching gears for the second song of the evening. "God of the sun, I'm taking you down on the inside!" Winter barked, cueing in bassist Dominic DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin for 3D Country's "2122." Backlit by old Slamball highlights, Bassin and DiGesu did their damndest to destroy their instruments, slapping and sprinting through the rhythm breakdown, before Green and keytarist Sam Revaz rejoined the free. “I'm looking for a place in my life, baby, ” Winter announced, quickly dropping his guitar and migrating to the double decker keyboard for the final instrumental break. “God of the sun, I’m taking Asheville down on the inside!”
Bassin lead the band out with a cymbal roll, garnering “Geese!” chants and “yee yee”s hollered from every corner of the crowd. Now two songs into the set, Liam finally joined the crowd, announcing dejectedly that he had forgotten to lock his car with several valuables left inside. But his worry quickly melted away (at least somewhat) as Geese queued up their next song, “This song is called 'Gravity Blues.'"
"Gravity Blues" dropped heavily on the unsuspecting Gizzheads, extracting whistles from the farthest reaches of the barricade and stank faces from even the most stoic and masculine of attendees. This was Green's song to shine, taking every opportunity to spit out some of the most unholy sounds I've ever heard come screeching out of a guitar. “I am floating away… goodbye." As the final discordant note of "Gravity Blues" crumbled over the crowd, Liam turned to me to remark, "If my car gets broken into and I get my identity stolen tonight, that'll make it worth all the trouble."
Winter dropped his guitar once more for a particularly calm introduction to "Jesse," stretching and contorting his back upon dropping the weight. He whispered the words to the crowd as if he were singing directly into the ear of each member of the audience, while Green and DiGesu laid out some of the harshest groove shredding Asheville's ever heard; backlit once again by a compilation of absurdly complicated billiard trick shots. Everyone in the building is cheering and throwing up their horns, begging for more from Green, inciting dancing and rocking from every costumed patron in the crowd. Geese sidestepped quickly into another dancey rendition of "Cowboy Nudes," further encouraging more bashful shuffling and macho head bopping from our fellow mustachioed groove snobs, “I said, New York City, underwater.”
The crowd hurled their hands into the sky, once again chanting abrasively, “Geese, Geese, Geese," as Green accidentally teased the riff from "Domoto." They instead took a beat to reasses, “Just a few adjustments,” they explained to the crowd of hungry Geese enjoyers. A moment or two went by and the huddle finally broke as Bassin leads his compatriots into "Tomorrow's Crusades." The stage lights began flickering blue, white and orange, emulating birthday candles and family gatherings of the past. Beer flew through the air as PBR tall boys and over poured beers were raised to the rafters, howling long, “Smoke fills the room, smoke fills your eyes, smoke fills up your whole life, we’re going to get it this time!" Bassin, Digesu and Revaz began pumping dissonance into the rapidly overflowing air, competing fiercely with the preemptive pen and vape smoke permeating from the farthest recesses of the venue floor.
Before the audience could even recognize the beginning fo a new song, Green stood up from their pedal board, indicating their readiness for the the next and final Geese song of the evening. “Why don’t you go home and fucking rot?" Winter bellowed to the onlookers below, met with shrieks of approval and delight, as "St. Elmo" streaked into their ears.
Smog and dry ice began to cloud the stage, preluding another discordant set of soloing and thrashing from Bassin, now hardly recognizable behind a thick layer of sweat and steam emanating from his still flailing arms. DiGesu stood to the right of the drum kit slapping his bass violently and incessantly while Revaz idled further on as if he were to die if he looked away from his keys for even half a second. Green knelt down once more at their pedal board, their amp feeding back sharply as the the stage lights pulsated in time with the crackling thunder spilling out around them. Winter howled into the microphone for a final beat, "Thank you." The audience erupted into cheers and chants as Geese disappeared into the now muted blue backdrop without a single glance behind them.
The crowd continued to roar as we watched them hastily exit the stage, replaced quickly by stagehands and techies. As the applause settled and swapped for excited chatter, a shared sentiment began to wash over the crowd; “what the fuck, that’s it?" In the wake of their awesome power and presence, we were blinded to the absence of several Geese staples; there was no "4D Country," no "I See Myself," not a single song from Projector. They had taken the stage at hardly 8 o'clock and by 8:30 they had disappeared into the backrooms of the Cherokee Center
Geese may have put on another outstanding show, but they left us so abruptly, with nothing to do but wonder if there should have been more. Thirty minutes was not even close to enough time to fully articulate to the Gizzheads of Asheville the awesome rock 'n' roll powerhouse that is Geese. As Liam and I meandered back into the vendor filled hallways of the venue, both sharing our desire to hear more as quickly as possible, Liam he once again turned to me to explain his plan to demand more, “They better be at the merch desk, I’m going to make them sing.”
Rob Lucchesi
Geese
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