By Paul Robicheau

This past weekend, Goose wished fans a festive holiday season with a Victorian-inspired carnival extravaganza.

Goosemas celebration at Amica Mutual Pavilion. Photo Paul Robicheau

Jam-bands have long staged celebrations around New Year’s Eve in the tradition of the Grateful Dead and Phish, who raised the bar through the introduction of elaborately themed props and hijinks for the annual holiday finale. But ascending newcomers Goose annually opts for earlier festive toasts, wishing fans a merry Goosemas with a Victorian-inspired carnival extravaganza this past weekend at Rhode Island’s Amica Mutual Pavilion.

Rick Mitarotonda of Goose at Amica Mutual Pavilion. Photo: Paul Robicheau

The Connecticut-bred band wasted no time in pulling out all the stops in Friday’s first of two nights at the rebranded Providence civic center, living up to the traditional ringmaster’s promise of “a carnival caught between tricks and delight.” A blizzard of balloons dropped from the rafters and giant animal puppets danced in front of the stage as Goose launched into the old-timey party melody “Dramophone” by the French electro-swing group Caravan Palace, with guest Stuart Bogie on clarinet. Members of Goose sported brightly colored/striped suits and mime-ish eye makeup, with Cotter Ellis drumming in an American flag-patterned jester’s outfit with a spiked crown. It was all a scene more like midnight at a New Year’s Eve Phish show than a hello.

The puppeteers and their furry/feathered charges departed as Goose pulsated into “Creatures,” continuing a full set of animal-themed songs that wove through Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones).” Indeed, Friday struck a highly charged balance of originals and smartly chosen covers. The second-set fed the intensity with a 20-minute “Arrow” (where Bogie’s tenor sax lent jazz-fusion edges to the performance’s float into improv) and then segued into a boldly menacing take on Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch.” The encore wound down with Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” lead guitarist Rick Mitarotonda’s vocals skillfully modulating from its apt lyric about “barkers and the colored balloons” to “You’re leaving there too soon,” a hauntingly prophetic final line in hindsight, given the next night’s deadly shooting at Brown University.

Peter Anspach of Goose at Amica Mutual Pavilion. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Saturday was infused with uneasiness in the wake of that tragic event three hours earlier and less than a mile away. It was the second night of Goosemas and the shooter was still at large. With security heightened around the venue, the first set began slightly earlier, with a very different, appropriate opening, picking up where Friday left off. Mitarotonda appeared onstage alone and began singing the Celtic folk song “Wild Mountain Thyme (Will You Go, Lassie, Go?),” soon joined by a Providence College Choir of six young women in white, holding candles like a vigil. The rest of the band picked up the tune and rode into “Give it Time” over Ellis’ galloping tom beats. “Turn it up and let it go,” Mitarotonda sang and slid into harmonized scatting to his guitar, building up energy through the ripping, bluegrassy shuffle “Flodown” and into “Echo of a Rose,” which surged into an exhilarating jam that rivaled peak Phish. Mitarotonda’s guitar kept cranking to higher levels, Ellis and keyboardist Peter Anspach locking into interplay while bassist Trevor Weekz lashed the pace with shifting strokes, before the jam resolved into lilting reggae.

That dynamic between long, scorching jams and atmospheric asides continued through the rest of Saturday’s first set and much of the second, perhaps setting up a numbing counter to the horror down the street. Respite came in less pithy covers than the night before, such as David Bryne and Brian Eno’s “Strange Overtones” (sung in falsetto by Mitarotonda over a Bruce Hornsby-like groove) and the Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” an obvious boost to open the second set with Bogie in a three-man horn section with trumpeter Jordan McLean and trombonist Dave Nelson.

Cotter Ellis of Goose at Amica Mutual Pavilion. Photo: Paul Robicheau

With Bogie’s baritone sax as a honking undercurrent, “Thatch” kicked off a run of 15-plus-minute numbers, which carried through the funkier “Big Modern!” (which took a detour into metallic rock) and crowd favorite “Hot Tea,” where fans sang along to words like “Lay your weapons down and reach up to the skies, when I die, when I die” (again, a lyric that lent pause in the moment) and a “da, da, da” chorus.

Despite the horns, the band’s straightforward variations on rock jams came close to overstaying its welcome through Saturday’s three hours of music. Yet Goose rounded out the second set with a true stylistic twist. As DJ Marb Menthols, Weekz traded his bass guitar for turntables to fuel a 10-minute ‘EDM jam that featured dancers in bird, fox, and rabbit heads frolicking on the fog-shrouded stage amid a funhouse clown’s face archway and posters promoting “The Two-Headed Yeti” and “The Spirit of the Dark Horse.”

“Factory Fiction” returned to regular programming, with beams of purple light forming transparent walls across the stage front, triggering a slow, near-proggy jam of waves and climaxes before Goosemas went back to how it began the previous night. The ringmaster returned to a platform at the center of the arena and “Dramophone” began the encore with a callback of puppets (flanked by silk-gripping aerialists) as well as blasts of confetti and endless balloons before the horns lightened up “The Empress of Organos.” Fans chimed in as Mitarotonda and the Providence College Choir sang, “You say, looks like rain today. We say, what a day to be livin.’” And Goosemas sealed a celebration to put aside the real-world darkness.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.