“God is real,” Cameron Winter sings on the second-to-last song on his debut album, 2024’s Heavy Metal;” “I’m not kidding, God is actually real/ I’m not kidding this time/ I think God is actually for real.”
Actually, ‘sings’ might not be the right word here. Throughout the nearly 45 stumbling minutes of music, Winter moans, groans and grumbles. Heart-wrenching melodies dance from his meager voice — like your shy, too-sober friend on a dark karaoke stage. There are low baritone dirges and wavering falsettos that sometimes crack with bursts of strange emotion.
“Heavy Metal” is full of challenging decisions like these, from the overwhelming sustained-piano wave of “Nina + Field of Cops,” to the dizzyingly melancholic horns in “Drinking Age,” to the stumblingly optimistic jaunt that is “Love Takes Miles.” There are woodwinds, mandolins, vibraphones, organs, drums and heavy use of shakers. One of the most heart-crushing tracks, “$0,” ends with a nearly two-and-a-half minute instrumental that is as loopy and whimsical as a daydream. Winter surprises himself, contradicts himself, angers himself and uplifts himself only to fall into a deep, self-hating sadness.
At all times the music is precarious and ready to collapse; at all times Winter distances himself from any conception of ‘good’ or ‘smooth’ singing.
Winter is not the first to sing badly. But in the annals of musical history, there is almost always another element in play, or else a point to such singing. Bob Dylan’s whimsical, nasally whine is overshadowed by his world-class songwriting and storytelling. The late-stage, late-career grumbles of Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen are purposeful; they reflect their age and their somber material. Neil Young is unique, J Mascis is the beloved slacker and Lou Reed is experimental and alternative. Rappers with ‘bad’ singing voices, such as Biz Markie, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Lil Wayne, are rappers first, singers second.
Conversely, ‘the voice’ seems to be the main point for Cameron Winter. On his website, there is a page that cycles through randomized reviews of his music. “His vocals are horrendous,” one of them reads. Or: “I can’t get past the vocals.” Or: “Thought this was a joke. Am I missing something?”
To publicly highlight the digressive and plain unlikeable qualities of one’s own vocal style is to call attention to it, especially as a budding singer-songwriter. Is the point, then, that he’s a bad singer? Are we more inclined to listen to him because he doesn’t autotune and use Melodyne on his vocal tracks, as is the current industry standard? Does that make him more ‘honest?’
Certainly, prominent musical critics are beginning to think so. The New York Times’s Lizzy Goodman painted “Heavy Metal” as a “tour de force,” Anthony Fantano called him “fantastically oddball” and Pitchfork’s Walden Green waxed poetic about his music’s “soul-scouring catharsis.” Each of these critics leaves room for dissent, but very little room, emphasizing that everyone should hop on the Cameron Winter train immediately because — in the words of Times writer Lizzy Goodman — he is on his way to a “certain kind of highly personal stardom.” And the public is picking up on it. Winter and his prog-art punk band Geese headlined a series of high-profile concerts this year, including an appearance at Newport Folk in Rhode Island. They will soon embark on a huge international tour (including a Boston show in November), and are putting out their own album, recorded by legendary producer Kenny Beats, later this September. All of a sudden, Cameron Winter and his slanting ideas are everywhere.
So what if you hate it?
What if you believe — as many do — that music should sound good? That autotune is the standard for a reason? What if you listen to “Heavy Metal” and decide you never want to listen to it again?
The battle lines around divisive, acquired-taste artists often leave no room for conversation — either you get it, or you don’t. In these cases, those in the latter category are excluded from important conversations, simply because they aren’t in on the inside joke.
I propose a wider scope of examining records like “Heavy Metal” that involves the undeniable cloud that always sits around an album: its context. It is the image that Winter creates with his online and offline presence that influences public and critical opinion on his debut, not just the music (or the voice) itself.
The image is most obvious in the album’s visual aspect, which most will see — the cover. Winter’s face, darkly serious and sullen, criss-crossed by metal chains. But it also lives in the music videos, slow pans away from Winter standing or sitting around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, surrounded by pigeons, wearing a “Daft Punk” Peter Griffin Kirby t-shirt. It is in the intertextuality of the sprawling internet: the dispirited selfies and ironic and esoteric short-form ‘reels’ videos on his Instagram account and the scribbled unflattering portraits on his website. And the image is not always visual — it is also Winter describing in a Line of Best Fit article how “Heavy Metal” was recorded in a series of Guitar Centers across the New York Tri State Area with Craigslist-sourced musicians including a disinherited cousin of John Lennon and a five-year-old bassist.
There is no name or nexus for the image that Cameron Winter is cultivating. It is inherently self-contradictory and confusing, full of jokes that you won’t get and lies that he tells you are lies. This scattered aesthetic owes scraps to the internet, to Brooklyn, to the pantheon of past singer-songwriters, to religion, to ancient Greek poetry, to Americana and to countless others — but it also seems to reject its influences altogether. Multiple press outlets describe Geese’s new album as their “disdain for music itself.” As a result, the artistry could easily be read as nonchalant, unconcerned, disaffected and careless.
But it is also motivated by a divine sense of inspiration (“God is actually real/ God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this/ I’m not kidding this time”). And care. Cameron Winter cares — enough to lay his emotions bare on microphones, enough to let it sound abrasive and surprising and ugly, enough to understand that not everybody is going to like it, and some might actually hate it. It’s a defiance of the structure that has long governed pop music and is now seeping into the genre we call ‘indie’: that industry-rooted need for everybody to find something in the music. And it’s picking up speed.
“Heavy Metal” is out now via Partisan Records. Geese’s “Getting Killed” comes Sept. 26.
