On stage, there is nowhere for Cameron Winter to hide. The 23-year-old New Yorker sits alone at a lustrous Steinway, spotlit by stark white beams. His entire performance hangs on just the timbre of his voice and the play of his hands. Normally, Winter would have a rock band with him – Geese, a surging four-piece made up of preternaturally talented Brooklyn school friends, the most exciting guitar band of the past few years. The action, and the weight of expectation, would be more evenly distributed.
Tonight’s outing, then, is a high-wire act, one pulled off with flair. Winter’s lived-in vibrato and mercurial fingers know exactly what they are doing. The audience of 3,000 are so quiet you can hear a plastic cup drop; so rapt that one reedy-voiced audience member can immediately stop the show because someone has fainted.
Winter plays much of his set with his back to the audience, quite often in near-darkness – the better to intensify the experience. His lanky form bent over the keys, he opens with the song that he fought to keep on Heavy Metal, his debut solo album: Try as I May, a rueful and vulnerable portrait of a misfiring relationship about “quiet ceremonies” that take place “in the dark parts of rooms”.
If he has a best-known solo track it is Love Takes Miles, which pairs pounding piano chords with Winter’s quick-flow words. “Turn around!” someone heckles, jovially, afterwards. “Isn’t this enough for you people?” comes the knowing, Dylanesque reply, more in jest than irritation. So great is Winter’s assurance he finds room for two unreleased songs, Emperor XIII in Shades and the biblical-sounding Rain, which hint at the possibility of more solo material to come.
Having just closed Geese’s US tour, Winter is playing a short European run of dates in support of Heavy Metal, which was released almost exactly a year ago and took the excitement around his band and multiplied it exponentially. It is a classic-minded but idiosyncratic album that wrestles with heartbreak and God, with eccentric reference to horses, “daughterless Russians” and “conga lines a thousand chickens long”. It sounded a little like someone as white hot as the young Julian Casablancas had made a Tom Waits album: not an obvious career move, but one that was exactly the right tactic.
He plays much of his set with his back to the audience. ‘Turn around!’ someone heckles, jovially. ‘Isn’t this enough for you people?’ comes the Dylanesque reply
Lyrics touch on the challenges of trying to crank out a masterpiece single-handedly, while going through a major depressive episode. You can sometimes hear little postcards from the studio. “I will keep breaking cups until my left hand looks wrong,” Winter croons on The Rolling Stones, “until my miracle drugs write the miracle song.” His claims about the record’s personnel (musicians supposedly recruited off Craigslist, a five-year-old bassist, recording sessions in guitar shops) sounded like they came straight from the Dylan and Jack White school of myth-making.
Clearly, this lank-haired, sardonic young talent has studied the greats, evident both in his solo work and in Geese’s 2023 album 3D Country. Timing, as ever, had its role: in roughly the same cycle as Timothée Chalamet was introducing twenty-nothings to Dylan, Winter was channelling fresh singer-songwriter vibes.
Tonight, Heavy Metal’s textures are transposed on to piano alone, and one probably unintended effect is to amplify how much Winter can recall the young Rufus Wainwright circa Poses (2001). (Winter has said that he had never heard of Wainwright before the comparisons started being made.) Crucially, though, Winter has his own vocabulary and concerns. Drinking Age channels Holden Caulfield more than any other source (“Everything is lying!” seethes Winter – even “rubber bands on the floor”). He either messes up the lyrics on this one, or messes with them – it’s hard to tell. And it doesn’t matter. Nina + Field of Cops is a tour de force, powered by arpeggiating keys pounded so fast as to suggest the systems music of American minimalists.
Words pour out of Winter. In a stream of altered consciousness, he throws out some characteristic lines. “I’ll love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth!” he froths; “I’m gonna eat my keys!” It’s hard to draw firm conclusions about Winter’s music, but his most riveting work enacts an internal battle to stay the course of love and more. If this world is, in his words, an “idiot festival”, then Winter is as good a guide through it as has come along in a while.