Review: Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter
Cameron Winter is extremely comfortable doing weird shit. After Geese released 3D Country in 2023, it only makes sense that the frontman of this upbeat prog outfit would go on to put out a solo record called Heavy Metal—with a cover more fitting to Drain Gang than Geese—that may be a buzzer-beater album of the year contender and one of the most prolific alternative folk releases of the year.
A combination of the froggish vocals that have become Geese’s signature and earnest jazz-infused folk production, Winter postures himself as another addition to the modern alternative folk canon, joining the ranks somewhere between Lambchop and Will Oldham, with the lyrical fervor of Leonard Cohen. Much like Geese’s discography, Heavy Metal swings between sounds, hopping from a singer-songwriter romp to droning six-minute long slam poetry ballads. Written entirely by Winter and recorded with the alleged support of a handful of musicians sourced off of Craigslist and a lifetime ban at Guitar Center (the album’s unwilling recording studio), the record comes off as an uninterrupted motor-driven stream of consciousness of someone depressed and disturbed, dulled by struggles in addiction and the normalized perils of performing in society.
The sound of Heavy Metal is generally sleepier than Winter’s work with Geese, but manages to retain attention. At times, it feels underwhelming—“Love Takes Miles” comes off as generic compared to some of the more avant-garde tracks on the record, as if Winter was covering any indie single of the 2010s. A quick recovery happens as “Drinking Age” starts, though, which mirrors the outsider greats with on-the-nose simplistic lyrics as Winter, freshly 22, reckons with his addiction, resigned to the fact that he’s “a piece of shit,” but that “From now on, this” is who he’s going to be.
Winter’s lyricism is absurdist poetry, not dissimilar to his online presence, where he shares individual, randomly generated fan reviews under a “theories” page on his website and maintains a Jack Schlossberg-esque Twitter presence full of quotes like “I killed a spider accidentally this morning, legs and guts all across the table, and then it got up and skittered away. No bullshit. What untold millions would people give to take back a mistake, to bring back the dead? It befell me casually, miraculously, and I felt nothing.” and “OATMILK KILLS SPERM CELLS !”
From lines intentionally short to incessant streams of consciousness, what listeners may lack in initial understanding, Winter, ever the modern philosopher, makes up for in the emotion present in both his voice and the production, creating a pidgin language to bridge the gap ‘til the Genius annotations roll in, so regardless of how hard you listen, you’ll get Heavy Metal. What you get, however, is pretty bleak: the mostly-coherent ramblings of someone who just can’t get straight. Winter tells a writer with The Line of Best Fit that the main tracking was done during a major depressive episode and that the process of writing and recording Heavy Metal was grueling. He bluntly croons on “$0,” “Fuck these people, I’m not here” before reeling into the outro, rambling “God is real, God is actually real / God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this / I'm not kidding this time” over tender strings, an unobscured glimpse at Winter and a highlight from the record. Multiple songs reference a hopeless relationship, including “$0”, plus themes of self-loathing, addiction and the artist’s plight of being “chained to the man,” drained of the energy preferably used to create.
The result of all this pain, though, is something that sounds utterly beautiful, comfortable in both stripped-down acoustic stylings and walls of sound that envelop its captive audience; the result of truly not giving a fuck and creating limitlessly.
I think about this record similarly to Daniel Johnston’s discography: both sounds influenced by deep sadness and bleak lived experiences, creating something so real and straight from the dome—something that captures such unfiltered humanness—that you can’t help but continue listening.