Everything Must Go
Whatever conversation remains ongoing about Goose’s taxonomical classification as a jam band or just a really excellent and adventurous pop-rock one should end with *Everything Must Go*. Shaggy enough for the tapers (“Iguana Song”) and emotionally direct enough for a movie montage (“Give It Time”), they cover a huge amount of musical ground while always sounding like themselves. There’s the irrepressible ’80s funk pop of “Animal” and “Feel It Now” (which are somehow both Michael Jackson and Talking Heads) alongside the woodland epic of “Silver Rising”—poles of the same spectrum the Dead and Phish spent decades reconciling. But if you really want to know why this so-called jam band succeeds on record, it’s because they carefully choreograph each point in their long-ish songs to lead organically to the next—in that sense, they barely jam at all.