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Sometimes an incidence, an out of place detail, is enough to understand that something moves in the musical undergrowth. When Nick Cave, in his digital diary The Red Hand Fileslets out that one of his inexplicably bright morning has been accompanied – among other things – by the solo debut of Cameron Winter, something lights up.
It is not the usual endorsement flagged with exclamation points and press releases: it is a quotation called sideways, en passant, it was not that a living monument of music is pronounced it. Heavy Metalthe first solo album of the Geese frontman is an album that does not slap you, it does not implore you, but turns around you with the drunk elegance of a bar pianist at 6 in the morning, between dreams, allergies and loops of Leonard Cohen.
Winter is 23 years old, the face as a student of philosophy that never goes to lessons, a voice that seems to have come out of a telephone booth broken in the Bronx. With the Geese he has already brought us to indie-noise, punkettar and angular territories. But here is another thing. Heavy Metal It's not Heavy and it's not metal. It is an ironic title, of course, but also a manifesto: there is heaviness, yes, but the inner one. The metal here is in the joints of the heart.
The disc opens with The Rolling Stonesand we are already there: the most wrong title for a piece like this. No riffs, no dusty road. Only a piano that staggers, arches that seem ironed by hand, and Cameron whispers and confesses as if he was leaving a vocal message too long. Then there is $ 0the “beating heart of the disc”, read in official communications at the end of 2024. Seven minutes that seem born in a post-antistamine dream: a kind of Phantasmagoria Piano-Driven, with texts that float between nonsense and net cuts in the soul. When he says “God is real”, you don't know whether to believe him or if to offer him a glass of water. Maybe both.
The beauty is that the record never makes cool. He does not seek the concept. It moves like a night creature, all instinct, smudges, details that run away but then return to dreams. There is Nausicaä (love will be revealed) who looks like a written love letter on an old game boy; The mute film suggestions of Nina in a Field of Cops, Can't Keep Anyhing Which sounds like a last breath and perhaps it is.
The story behind the album is already legend, fueled by the communication linked to the disc, which has put in circulation different “truths or presumed such” on Cameron Winter: it is said to have been recorded between hotels and guitar center and that the concept was born during a hospitalization for mononucleosis listening to Leonard Cohen; And again, that the songs were written by Winter before the age of 15 and played by musicians recruited on Craiglist, including a cousin disinherited by John Lennon. True or not, it doesn't matter. The aesthetic confirms it: Lo-Fi but precise, fragile but never completely broken. Produced by Loren Humphrey, who paste, sew, tear and recruit like a tailor for souls on exhaustion. Winter says he lost his voice and 15 kilos during recording. We believe it, even if it is not needed: what matters is that in the middle of a sea of discs designed for the algorithm, Heavy Metal It is a human object, too human. It is full of cracks, but you can pass through and discover something about you.
If Nick Cave's morning was made luminous by Heavy Metalit's not because it's a perfect record, but because it's alive.
