Advent Music (or Four Geese A-Playin')

Usually my Christmas season listening is a steady diet of A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio and a curated list of merry favorites. But this year there has also been a steady dose of the album Getting Killed by Geese. I saw the album on numerous end-of-the-year “Best of” lists and figured that I should give it a listen. I almost didn’t make it past the album opener “Trinidad,” which features a cacophony of drums and guitars as frontman Cameron Winter wails, “There’s a bomb in my car!” This ain’t Christmas music. But it might just be Advent music.

I am not going to sit here and tell you what any of these lyrics mean. Sure, I can posit what a hundred horses dancing in times of war and conversations with Joan of Arc convey but it would all be shots in the dark. But how does the album feel? In the chaos, noise, anxiety, and brief moments of grace, it sounds like now. Both now in the sense of this time and place in history and now as in Advent. This is a season of waiting, expectation, and hoping for some light to come into a dark world.

In that way, I see a lot of connection between the lyrics from “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” like “O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer / Our spirts by Thine advent here / Disperse the gloomy clouds of night / And death’s dark shadows put to flight” and these from the title track of Geese’s album: “I, I can’t even hear myself talk / I’m trying to talk over everybody in the world / I, I can’t even taste my own tears / They fall into an even sadder bastard’s eyes.” Sure, you’re not going to sing that second one at your Candlelight Christmas Eve Service, but the sentiment is the same. Things are not great. There are gloomy clouds, people talking over each other, and tears falling everywhere. This is the world we’re in. It is a bit subversive for what is ostensibly a merry and bright time of year.

We understandably don’t want to lean into the stark contrast between how things are and how things could be. But Advent is all about something better, something revolutionary coming around the corner. It’s Mary singing about the mighty being laid low in the Magnificat. It’s hope being born far from the corridors of wealth and political influence and instead with a vulnerable baby with not even a proper home. It’s the story of family that has to flee a power-hungry despot.

And Advent keeps looking ahead. It remembers that baby does not stay a baby. Instead he loves, teaches, heals, and sacrifices in a way that simultaneously brings hope to those who hear and disturbs those believing they pull the levers controlling society. I just happened to read the story of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem. I was reminded of how his riding of a humble donkey was a clear counterpoint to the conquering kings and generals who would ride into town on a war horse; a metaphorical bomb in the burro if you’ll forgive me (Geese probably won’t, but I highly doubt they’ll read this). Things will change but they will change in way that runs counter to standard operating procedures.

All of which is to say, Advent is a time to make some noise. Noises of all kinds. Joyful. Angry. Defiant. Hopeful. Mournful. This is a world where the rich and powerful treat everything from people to art as commodities. We have witnessed a year of war, air strikes, masked men taking men, women, and children from their places of work and schools, and rulers in rooms of gold pretending that they are heralding a renaissance of faith and goodness. It’s deeply messed up. We ought to name it because we feel it. So thrash about, yell, quietly reflect, pray, serve, love, and do all the things. There is a better world than this and we’re invited to be part of it.