Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall review – Paul Thomas Anderson’s sumptuous recording is an immediate classic
New York Film Festival: The Geese frontman mesmerizes in a concert film that is both swoony and austere
One night last December, weary from a busy week and the impending doom of winter, I hurried into Carnegie Hall to witness Cameron Winter. The Geese frontman was marking the end of a breakout year with a series of rapturously received solo acoustic shows, drawing the penitent for whom the 23-year-old’s primordial voice struck some kind of destabilizing natural frequency. I had bought the ticket months earlier, after being hypnotized by Winter’s beguiling debut solo album, Heavy Metal, and sat transfixed in the rafters, far from the Brooklynite’s lanky, stygian presence before a single piano.
So far, in fact, that I assumed the maybe-camera that came on stage at one point was a bit, perhaps a jab at our incessant need to film things from a very deadpan celebrity whose only non-music interlude that evening was to wordlessly stand, stretch and mockingly fight with the stage door, as if trying to escape his own momentous show. I emerged from the event teary, charged by what felt like a communion across time, and confused by a friend’s text: “can’t wait for the cameron winter PTA doc”.
