"I'm in the trunk. My wrists and ankles are tied. Tape over my mouth until it almost covers my nose but I can breathe barely. I must have been here for hours, everything's stiff and my head throbs like someone's drumming on china." This, an excerpt from "Victim", is how the Golden Palominos' latest, Dead Inside, begins. The nine other songs also smother the listner with tales of murder, domination, and decay.
Anton Fier has been the mainstay of the Golden Palominos over its thirteen-year history, working with John Lydon, Michael Stipe, Syd Straw, Matthew Sweet, Bob Mould, and Richard Thompson in the past, and more recently, Lori Carson and Bootsy Collins. He has evolved in style from country rock to slight electronics, and has now moved into the arena of electronic, atmospheric darkness with Dead Inside, a collaboration with New York poet Nicole Blackman.
Fier's music is generally good, although it has boring moments. But what's clear is that the music is only supposed to be a backdrop for Blackman's spoken word performance - often quiet and nonrhythmic. Sometimes the two mesh well, creating a rhythmic balance that keeps the listener's attention; "Belfast" and "Ride", with their A-B-C-B lyrical structure, combined with talking instead of singing, oddly bring to mind any number of MC 900 Ft Jesus tunes. Other times, the delivery or structure miss their mark or are awkward (A small example: "Children are killed because they write an enemy's name backwards on the wall," Blackman enunciates angrily in the verbal barrage of "The Ambitions Are").
Blackman's poetry itself is interesting - realistic doom and gloom throughout. Still, there seems to be little adaptation of the material commonly performed at a reading to the realm of musical expression. Both Fier and Blackman favored a freeform approach to writing the songs, but the music and text seem stuck together incohesively.
Fier and Blackman deserve credit for breaking away and creating something unique with Dead Inside, but the aural black paint they have coated their audience with sometimes wears too thin.
