APOCALYPSE THEN

Inventing goth-hop was the Golden Palominos final act

As a teenager in the 1990s all I knew about the Golden Palominos was that drummer and bandleader Anton Fier was part of the rhizomatic tangle of Bill Laswell projects and that I didn’t connect with their art rock plus guest vocalist visits from Michael Stipe or Bob Mould. It was a little too adult-alternative for my then severely proscribed taste. Look, I was a little shit with a college radio show and proud of it.

Then I was given a promo copy of Dead Inside by a fan of the band who loathed it. For Dead Inside, Fier dropped the guitars¹ and live drums for a slick electronic landscape that aimed to capture all things 1996 Glastonbury dance tent: the narcotic beats of Scorn, RZA’s crunched samples, and the MDMA lockjaw squelches of Future Sounds of London.²  That’s just the music. The other half of Dead Inside is poet and performance artist Nicole Blackman acting as material witness to the crimes of pre-millennial New York.

The opening track, “Victim,” is the most harrowing first-person ac…