No Expectations 084: Hungersite
No Expectations 084: Hungersite
On seeing Goose for the first time during their three-show run at Salt Shed. Also, I recommend new LPs by Allegra Krieger, Eggy, Lunar Vacation, and more.
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Headline song: Goose, “Hungersite”
Thanks for being here and letting me take a week off. As you probably guessed, this is another jam band-themed installment of No Expectations. It’s funny: I’ve spent almost two years carefully cultivating a readership interested in under-the-radar indie rock acts only to go full wook, forgoing regular coverage with occasional long detours on Dead and Company at the Sphere, a King Gizzard Discography Deep Dive, and seeing Phish for the first time. Now, I wrote one on the popular Connecticut quintet Goose.
I appreciate you sticking around. If you’re not into jams, you can scroll down to find some stellar album recommendations from under-the-radar independent acts but I hope you give this group a chance.
On Not Saying Boo to Goose
Gig Recap: Goose at Salt Shed (9/11, 9/12, 9/13)
2024 has been a banner year for jam bands. When artists across genres cancel shows due to low ticket sales and small clubs feel underattended, this scene is especially thriving. Dead and Company grossed $131,449,777 on 476,945 tickets during a 30-date residency at the Sphere. Phish played four shows at the domed Las Vegas venue too, but their summer tours and festival Mondegreen had them reaching new heights during their 41-year tenure as a band. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the genre-hopping Australian psych-rockers with jam tendencies, returned to the States for several marquee shows that included acoustic nights and three-hour marathon sets. Bluegrass jammer Billy Strings is packing arenas now while multiple Grateful Dead cover bands are filling up large theaters. Umphrey’s McGee, Eggy, moe., Widespread Panic, and more had stellar runs too.
More than any of their peers, Goose are poised to be the heir apparent to Phish and the Dead. (You could make a case for Gizz but I don’t think they’d want that mantle). Two years removed from an influential cosign from Phish’s Trey Anastasio at Radio City Music Hall, Goose’s main songwriter and lead guitarist Rick Mitarotonda was tapped this week to join Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir’s band at Dead Ahead festival with Sturgill Simpson. The band’s settled into a new groove this year. They sold out Forest Hills Stadium in New York (13,000 tickets) and seem to be gearing up for bigger and bigger venues. Beyond their jam scene bonafides, they’ve also had indie artists like Vampire Weekend and Father John Misty along with radio rockers Mt. Joy sit in with them onstage. Since the Dead, there hasn’t been a band from this community with broader pop appeal.
People who write about music like being early. There’s a real thrill when a band you covered for years suddenly catches on, grows an audience, and experiences success. It’s validating and feels cool to say that you liked something before it became popular. That said, it’s not just an ego trip. It’s proof that artist development takes time and that supporting music you love from the ground floor can be fulfilling and rewarding. This is not the case with me and Goose. It’s 2024 and I’m only now writing about them. Mitarotonda formed the band along with bassist Trevor Weekz and drummer Ben Atkind (who left the group in 2023) a decade ago in Wilton, CT. And last week, they sold roughly 15,000 tickets in Chicago from three consecutive shows at Salt Shed Fairgrounds. I went to each one. I’m late to the party, but besides Dead & Company at the Sphere or Greg Freeman at Lincoln Hall, Hannah Frances at Constellation, or Whitney at Thalia Hall, seeing them for the first time was the most fun live music experience I had in months.
For years, I had every opportunity to get on board with Goose but I reflexively avoided them each time. In January 2019, I was drinking at the GMan Tavern when someone there said they were going down the street to Cubby Bear for a show. He invited me and said a band called Goose, who he was most excited to see, were opening. I respectfully declined and didn’t mention that catching a four-act jam band gig at a venue not known for live music since the ‘80s sounded like hell. (Apparently, no more than 20 people attended). At one point, I listened to the first song on their debut LP 2016 Moon Cabin, and figured they weren’t for me. To be honest, I hated it. By December, Goose headlined the 500-cap Lincoln Hall. A friend who worked there put me on the list and said it’d be a great show. I didn’t go. When I pitched an editor in 2021 on the New York indie rock outfit Geese, they said, “I didn’t realize you were a jam band guy.” This misunderstanding only emboldened my aversion to giving Goose, the actual jam band, a fair shot.
I’m not sure my journey would’ve been any different had I caught them playing small clubs five years ago. For one, I hadn’t developed any interest in this kind of music: my curiosity only jumpstarted when I got into the Dead early last year. I needed to develop what Steven Hyden calls “jam ears” in order to “appreciate the hypnotic quality of long improvisations,” which is a different muscle to exercise than enjoying the often improvised jazz I already loved. (Jam is a genre where you get more out of it the more time you put into it). Two, Goose really kicked it up a notch recently with no small thanks to their new drummer Cotter Ellis, who joined the band in January from Burlington, VT. They’re currently the best iteration they’ve ever been. A few months ago, I decided to try again, and watching a May concert they posted on YouTube finally sold me. Their Solshine Reverie show featured songs like “Tumble,” which boasted a feel that evoked “Scarlet Begonias,” a goofy but infectious track called “Hot Love & The Lazy Poet,” and earnest covers of Prince and Kylie Minogue. Though I still had reservations (many due to fear that my jam friends who hated them would roast me), I knew there was something to this music that I had to dig deeper into.
Goose are a jam band but they consciously subvert the genre’s stereotypes. “I mean, [jam band] is a demeaning title,” Mitoratonda said in a 2022 interview with Steven Hyden, “Because frankly there are a lot of cheesy and not great jam bands that have existed over time.” When the Grateful Dead kickstarted this movement more than a half-century ago, they did it by combining old American styles of music like blues, folk, country, and early rock’n’roll with unpredictable setlists and avant-garde improvisational jams. Phish did the same but with funk, classic rock, prog, and reggae. Goose, however, use a more contemporary palette: They draw from big tent indie like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and as well as jam mainstays like Phish and Dave Matthews Band. They write relentlessly hummable songs and take pains to create fully-formed studio LPs with collaborator D. James Goodwin, who’s worked on LPs by No Expectations favorites Bonny Light Horseman, Kevin Morby, and Whitney. If you prefer proper albums, start with their 2022 effort Dripfield. If you want to jump into the shows, the recent release Live at the Capitol Theatre is an exhaustive primer on their catalog.
When I started warming up to Goose, I knew they’d eventually announce a Chicago date. Unlike Phish, where I saw them for the first time going in totally blind, I wanted to immerse myself in this band’s repertoire first. I liked what I heard and I didn’t want to treat this music as some sort of oddity or their fans as some wook safari attraction. So, I read a blog from the fan site Wysteria Lane titled “Goose 101: An Introduction And Guide” and listened to everything over the next few months. This is psycho behavior, I know. But as a music journalist, I try to research as much as possible. It was actually a blast.
One of the coolest things about this band is that hours after they leave the stage, they master their soundboards and upload them to Bandcamp and Nugs. Keyboardist and guitarist Peter Anspach worked at a podcast company where he learned how to master audio and would do that for every gig from 2019 onward. Everything is online. It’s an admirably fan-friendly move that I wish more indie rock bands did as well. (Now, they have a team of videographers and engineers who livestream each gig in addition to the soundboard uploads).
Listening to those early shows, I was so curious to find out how this scrappy band became the polished rock behemoths I heard from that May ‘24 show. I saw glimpses during their breakout 2019 Peach Festival set and their COVID live streams called the “Bingo Tour,” where they added percussionist Jeff Arevalo to the lineup. There, they’d pick randomly selected songs from a ball machine, with twists like “each member take a lap,” “no drums,” or “20+ minute jam.” I speedran watching their catalog expand, their grooves get tighter, and their tastes become more sophisticated. Each member took marked leaps as instrumentalists too. What was most rewarding is witnessing Anspach, who learned keys when he joined the band in 2017, evolve from a rudimentary rig to a stellar player who could eventually hold his own next to Bruce Hornsby. When drummer Cotter Ellis joined in ‘24 for their Live at the Capitol Theatre shows, I was hooked.
Going into last week’s Salt Shed residency, I wanted to attend all three shows to hear the songs I’d grown to love like “Hungersite,” “Same Old Shenanigans (dawn),” “Echo of a Rose,” “Feel It Now,” and “726.” Since the band never repeats songs from night to night and rarely does so when they return to the same city, I knew my chances of getting all of them were slim. But when they hit the stage on night one, I stopped caring about chasing individual tunes. All my prep and at-home listening felt inconsequential compared to the experience of seeing it live. It’s a stunning experience, complete with Salt Shed’s perfect sound system and a jaw-dropping light show from Goose’s Lighting Director Andrew Goedde. Even songs that initially turned me off, like “Butter Rum,” were incredible renditions in person. I eventually got the performances of “SoS” and “Echo” that I wanted to hear, but really I was just happy I had two more nights of this. My girlfriend, who by osmosis has listened to way too much of this band for a few months, had a great time too.
One of the most obvious features of going to a jam band show is how nice everyone is. It makes me want to view jam as more of a community than a genre (after all, there’s a lot of sonic difference between a group like STS9 and, say, Eggy). People will chat you up, talk about their love for the band, and compliment you on your Grateful Dead shirt (Which is funny, because maybe a third of the attendees are also wearing Dead apparel). Ryan Storm, a gregarious 24-year-old writer and expert who runs the
Substack, which reviews shows along with his Always Almost There podcast that recaps each Goose concert, introduced himself too. We both bet that the band would play their early staple “Madhuvan” tonight (we were right) and I agreed to hop on the pod during the weekend. There’s such a communal and inclusive vibe at these gigs that it makes the most welcoming indie rock show feel closed off. Go to one show and you can see why people uproot their lives to follow this music.Now that I was one gig in, I brought my friend Andrew, a Deadhead who’d never seen Goose, to night two. Before they got onstage, we met a group from Michigan. One of them, Nate, was wearing a Geese shirt and I told him I hoped we’d hear a “Factory Fiction.” (We did, and we’d run into each other maybe a dozen times before the three-night stint was over). Goose’s first set rolled along nicely. I spent most of it making sure Andrew was having a good time so I could stop worrying that my newfound appreciation for this band wasn’t some third-life crisis. (Thankfully, he’s now a fan too). I admit there are still moments where I’d want their hooks to be more left-field, for them to explore different genre textures like krautrock, country, or post-punk, and for some of the fantastical escapism in the lyrics to be more grounded. But taken holistically, a Goose show is disarming, immersive, and euphoric. It’s so inviting and impressive that it’s not hard to let go of the nitpicky part of your brain.
For “A Western Sun,” Goose brought out the acclaimed and virtuosic jazz guitarist Julian Lage, who was playing the next night at Thalia Hall. Out of everything I’ve heard, that collaboration is not just the finest sit-in the band’s ever done but one of the best standalone performances in Goose history. The astounding jams were knotty and playful but never veered too far from the song’s melodic bones. Lage’s warm but gnarly Telecaster tone complemented the band perfectly and Mitarotonda knew when to let his guest shine. They then played “Turned Clouds,” the Moon Cabin song I didn’t like initially, and it floored me. If you’re open to it, this music will endlessly surprise you.
I went with more friends on night three, Brian and Jerry, who were both first-timers. I tried to prep them as much as possible but the thing about a Goose show is its unpredictability. You don’t know what songs they’ll play and sometimes the songs you know will be performed in dramatically different fashions. You could get a “So Ready” or a “Slow Ready,” a “Tumble” or a “Vibey Tumble.” Sometimes they’ll do short, straightforward renditions, other times they’ll stretch out a tune past the half-hour mark. The jams can be blissful with darting guitar leads, or it’s atmospheric, dark, and wonky. Or, it’s a secret third thing. They opened with “Hot Love & The Lazy Poet,” the song that made me realize I liked Goose and throughout the set played several new songs mixed in with Dripfield fan favorites like “Borne” and the title track. There was a “State of the Art (A.E.I.O.U.)” Jim James cover too. Both sets ruled.
After the show, Brian, who just finished writing a book on the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound, texted me this. “I will have a great time with almost any band running with the Dead playbook,” he said. “I knew this going in cold, but actually seeing and hearing was a different thing. Walking up, and listening to folks talking about last night’s show, it was like ‘Oh, right, this is the Dead model. This rocks.’” As Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic points out, maybe why this approach still resonates is a direct reaction to how we listen to music in 2024. “One reason for this renaissance is the stultifying nature of listening to music in the era of streaming dominance,” he writes in his excellent Goose profile this year. “Platforms such as Spotify seek to identify users’ tastes and then serve up more of the same. Jam bands, in contrast, are unpredictable by definition.” If you exclusively listen to things algorithmically tailored to your tastes, you lose room for revelation.
I thought of this when I appeared on the Always Almost There podcast Saturday and had to explain why an indie rock journalist decided to listen to an ungodly amount of Goose in one summer. The hosts of that show are all deep wells of esoteric band knowledge who can rattle off tour dates and even how the jams sounded from gigs played years ago. It’s both admirable and kinda nuts. I had a blast on there but I realized I’m coming from a totally different perspective and not just as a neophyte. While I love the long moments of improvisation and find they’re some of the only things that I can simultaneously listen to and write to, I’m a fan for the songs. Goose are full of people my age who all grew up on the same stuff that I did (besides Phish). There’s a comforting aspect to this catalog that I can’t quite shake. Plus, they can write undeniably great tunes. My initial aversion to jam bands is I thought that the songs were simply tossed-off vessels for meandering improvisation. With Goose, the jams serve the songwriting.
A few years ago, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig interviewed Goose for Relix magazine after the band covered “2021” with a rocking, 20-minute and 21-second version. They talked about breaking out of creative boxes and finding inspiration. Koenig said something that really resonated and put to words why I suddenly started gravitating towards music that I once wrote off. "To me, it’s almost like getting back to the first time you picked up a guitar or the first time that you really got excited about a record," he said. "When you are in your late 20s, 30s, or 40s, you already know the history, you know the commentary, you know the debate. Sometimes all you can do as an adult—to get back to that vibey taking-it-all-in feeling—is just check out other universes.”
When I first started No Expectations, one of the earliest entries was about coming out of the pandemic and finding myself 30 years old seeing innovative and exciting bands formed by folks a decade younger than me. I worried about my taste becoming calcified but I was so relieved that I loved what I heard, that I could endorse these young people making truly excellent music wholeheartedly. Now at 32, I’m hardly old, but I can see myself eventually going to fewer shows, getting less curious about novel things, and closing myself off to discovery. While I could’ve chosen something more culturally cool than jam bands, getting into this community has been more fun and fulfilling than I could’ve ever expected. I’m just thankful that at this point in my life, I can still find the magic and dive into surprise musical rabbit holes that become long-lasting obsessions.
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 084 Playlist: Spotify // Apple Music
1. Goose, “Hungersite”
2. Dummy, “Intro-UB”
3. Trace Mountains, “Hard to Accept”
4. Eggy, “Come Up Slow”
5. Peel Dream Magazine, “Central Park West”
6. Allegra Krieger, “Burning Wings”
7. Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears, “Roll On Buddy”
8. Lunar Vacation, “Just For Today”
9. Hataalii, “Something’s in the Air”
10. Les Sons Du Cosmos ft. Semiratruth, “COOLIDGE”
11. Anna Butterss, “Pokemans”
12. SML, “Rubber Tree Dance”
13. Y U U F, “Lever Du Sol”
14. Goose, “Dripfield”
15. Winged Wheel, “Grief in the Garden”
16. Goose, “SoS” (Live, 4/9/24)
Allegra Krieger, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine
There’s a water-like quality to Allegra Krieger’s vocal delivery. On Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, the New York songwriter can weave unlikely notes, and diaristic observations into something totally hypnotic. Her piercing but inviting voice undulates and soars throughout the 13 tracks here but it truly shines when she sings bluntly about death and dark thoughts. Highlight “One or the Other” deals with an apartment fire that killed her neighbor and it opens with the haunting lines, “I had a dream the night before the fire / That I killed someone / A sign of bad luck or just a reminder / That we all have a hand in destruction.” Just reading the words, the LP can be unrelentingly bleak but there’s such a grace to Krieger’s writing and musicianship that carries the material to something transcendent and even hopeful.
Eggy, Waiting Game
Even more than Goose, Eggy are the jam band most tailored to an indie rock fan’s tastes. On their latest LP Waiting Game (produced by White Denim’s James Petralli), the New Haven quartet writes such tasteful, adventurous, and playful songs that anyone listening blind would have no clue they come from the jam community. Across 10 colorful and tight tracks that barely crack the half-hour mark (their previous effort stretched well over an hour), the band leans on a timeless pop sensibility and strikingly grounded emotional lyricism. They sing about people, feelings, and relationships with a palpable realism that feels refreshing compared to some of the goofy stuff many of their jam-minded peers write about. “Laurel” is a killer tune with an explosive chorus anchored by drummer Alex Bailey’s silky voice. Same goes for the swirling “Smile,” the resonant title track, and the breezy “Come Up Slow.” Though each member of Eggy writes and three sing live, here, the vocal duties go solely to Bailey (an Oak Park, IL native). This band’s been on my radar since they took Friend of the Substack Brad Goodall on tour years ago. It’s been so sick to see them make something that’s not just “great for a jam band” but truly stellar.
Hataalii, Waiting for a Sign
Hataałii (pronounced: Hah-toth-lee) is from Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation, and writes some of the most beguiling and fascinating songs of the year on Waiting for a Sign. The 21-year-old crooner and songwriter is an unorthodox frontman: his baritone warbles meander and twist dramatically around these hazy songs. As a writer, he's somewhere between impressionistic and uncompromisingly direct. On the deceptively sunny "Something's In the Air," he sings, "Oh I got some news for you / Sometimes life ain't easy Sioux / For people who look like me and you / Low nose and oh a deadly stare." Opener "Alex Jones" hints at nihilism with lines like, "I ain't never had no job / Just gettin up and gettin off / Couple bucks and I'm feeling good." Beyond the writing, which is knotty and excellent, is how peerless he is as a performer. No one sounds like this: you can see hints of Nick Cave or Mac DeMarco (who is a fan) but no one is even close to how mesmerizing a Hataalii song can be.
Lunar Vacation, Everything Matters, Everything's Fire
Decatur’s Lunar Vacation expertly operate between several polarities on their sophomore LP Everything Matters, Everything's Fire. Their most polished album to date, it somehow never loses its bite. When it’s at its most shoegaze-indebted squall, it keeps the galvanizing, arena-ready pop in its writing. At its most accessible, it’s still full of surprises and mystifying production flourishes. Signed to the small-but-scrappy label Keeled Scales which boasts Good Looks, Jo Schornikow, and several other newsletter favorites, no artist on their roster makes hooks flow so seamlessly and sound so effortless as these Georgia-based twentysomethings. Opener “Sick” is a woozy earworm, complete with thrumming acoustics and airy vocals while the following track “Set the Stage” is a pure bliss dreamscape of fuzzed-out guitars. They seem poised to follow what Alvvays accomplished: writing consistently great songs that never overstay their welcome and becoming more expansive and ambitious as arrangers.
What I watched:
Sunday Night Football: Chicago Bears vs. Houston Texans (NBC)
I’m officially retracting what I said several weeks ago about watching Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Chicago Bears. I wrote, “So far, the first Hard Knocks season documenting the Bears has me so hyped that I believe we’ll win it all.” It turns out the team I was raised to be a fan of still sucks. What can you do? Maybe we’ll turn it around next week.
What I read:
The Boys Are Leaving Town: The Final Days Of Japandroids (Stereogum)
Still, for most of their career, Japandroids faced little hostility, which ultimately made its rare appearance more memorable to King. “All the old adages are true. I rarely think about the good shows, but I’m still haunted by the bad ones. I wish I could do an entire tour of redos.” Which gets to why King might have decided to do his first interview in four years to begin with. Japandroids did an extensive 2012 Pitchfork profile that has served as an ur-text for the band; King and Prowse were remarkably candid and insightful about their strengths and limitations, describing themselves as not “creative” people but rather “people who love the people who are born with that special thing so much that they want to try their best to get as close as they can to it.”
The AI Music Honeymoon Phase Is Over (Billboard)
On Sept. 4, the public learned of the first-ever U.S. criminal case addressing streaming fraud. In the indictment, federal prosecutors claim that a North Carolina-based musician named Michael “Mike” Smith stole $10 million dollars from streaming services by using bots to artificially inflate the streaming numbers for hundreds of thousands of mostly AI-generated songs. A day later, Billboard reported a link between Smith and the popular generative AI music company Boomy; Boomy’s CEO Alex Mitchell and Smith were listed on hundreds of tracks as co-writers.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar
Back in May, I was hired to help launch a newsletter for WTTW News and one of the things they asked me to do was to add selected concert listings to it. Now that the new newsletter, Daily Chicagoan, is up and running, the No Expectations Weekly Chicago Show Calendar will live there. I’ll link it out each week here. I appreciate your understanding.
Was interested but unconvinced until Western Sun. Wow! What a performance 👏
I'm a Geeser not a Gooser (not that they're mutually exclusive, LOL) but I loved reading about your whole process of discovery, investigation, and live revelation. This IS how you keep from calcifying!