Geese Bring Organized Chaos to Nelsonville Music Festival

On Thursday night, Geese returned to Southeast Ohio’s Nelsonville Music Festival as headliners, and from the first note, they made clear their live show is not about faithful reproduction. The band’s performance had the skittering, free-fall quality of an organism playing itself — rhythms shifting, riffs tossed casually between members, structures bent into new shapes. The six musicians moved with a telepathy that comes only from years of growing up together behind instruments, and the result was the kind of organized chaos that feels both spontaneous and surgically tight.

The festival itself resists grandiosity. Now in its 25th year, Nelsonville remains deliberately compact: a side stage sits in the woods with a hammock zone for listeners, and the late folk singer Michael Hurley was an annual fixture until his recent death. Organizer Tim Peacock has no interest in ballooning into a Coachella-sized event. Yet the lineup often leans impressively broad — Thursday alone included Wednesday (who played just before Geese), Big Freedia, Saintseneca, and Anna Tivel, with Gillian Welch & David Rawlings and Mavis Staples still to come over the weekend.

Three years ago, Geese played this festival touring their warped classic-rock album 3D Country as a relatively obscure young band. Since then, the solo success of frontman Cameron Winter and the critical reach of their latest full-length Getting Killed have elevated their profile considerably. Winter acknowledged the shift with deadpan self-deprecation, joking that the band had grown worse at their instruments. A healthy mosh pit near the front of the 6,000-capacity crowd suggested nobody cared about that — they were too busy being pulled into the same unruly current the band was generating on stage.