Anton Fier and the Golden Palominos

The drummer Anton Fier rapidly ascended through a large number of bands (Pere Ubu, Feelies, Lounge Lizards). Leveraging his many friendships and prestige, and influenced by Material, Fier organized the Golden Palominos (Celluloid, 1983), a sort of “negative” rock supergroup featuring Arto Lindsay, Fred Frith, David Moss, John Zorn, Mark Miller, Michael Beinhorn, Bill Laswell, and James Ladeen Tacuma. The sound is naturally the most bizarre avant-garde “crossover”: a funk driven by the rhythm section, estranged by Lindsay’s “brasilero” crooning, and distorted by assorted brass cacophonies.

Fier keeps time with impressive clarity amid a whirlwind of noisy orgies: Clean Plate is disturbed by dissonances, sub-tribal batucada rhythms, and even hints of minimalism; Hot Seat by vocal miasmas and electronic layers; ID by minimalist bells and abyssal guitar distortions; Under The Cap by vocal gargling and screeching brass; Monday Night by drum machine, overdubs, and metallic clangs. The funniest nonsense is Two Sided Fist, a clownish fanfare of violin and saxophone, accompanied by noisy improvisations. Fier drives the depraved sabbath into an alien dance, a truly overwhelming and paroxysmal rhythm machine that no harmonic depravity can tame, culminating in the most relentless track, Cook Out, in DMX style, accompanied only by bass and electronic effects. The ensembles vary from track to track, recombining the musicians’ sonic personalities in different ways.

The Palominos’ second album, Visions Of Excess (Celluloid, 1985), was recorded by lineups that now included Michael Stipe, Richard Thompson, Henry Kaiser, Syd Straw, Bill Laswell, John Lydon, Jody Harris, Chris Stamey, Carla Bley, and Jack Bruce. Abandoning electronic tricks and improvisational whims, the album produces tracks illustrating the postmodern concept of a jam session. The Palominos are an ensemble without a fixed personality, living off the subtle virtuosity of individual members. On this second album, it is mainly the singers who drive the sound, each shifting it toward their own style: Stipe babbles through Boy Go, his typical epic and cryptic folk-rock, with clear jingle-jangle guitar work from Harris and Thompson, while Syd Straw’s lyrical, transcendent soprano paints the folk-rock of Kind Of True and the martial flamenco of Buenos Aires.

The rediscovery of the “song” leads to a return to pop form, with less wild percussiveness and freer improvisation. If the first album was fundamentally a rhythm-section record with sound effects, this second one is a sound-effects record with a rhythm section.
Most tracks center on the Fier/Laswell/Harris trio, a typical ’70s power-rock trio: Clustering Train is a frantic guitar boogie crowned by Stipe’s hermetic grunts; Silver Bullet is a psychedelic country-blues propelled by an electronic rhythm; Only One Party is driven by a classic hard-rock riff (from Immigration Song), around which the trio, aided by Lindsay’s vocal and noise devastations, constructs a piece of the absurd.

Blast Of Silence (1986) is even more accessible, influenced by Parsons’ country-rock (Angels), Little Feat’s boogie-soul (Work Was New), psychedelic revival (Strong Simple Silences), and the Band’s country-gospel (Working Harder), with Syd Straw often stealing the show from her more celebrated companions. Leaving behind avant-garde arrangements, virtuosic solos, and skewed harmonies, Fier focuses on a cold blend of rural folk and urban intellectualism. Matthew Sweet contributes Something Becomes Nothing.

Even more ethereal is A Dead Horse (Celluloid, 1989), suspended in a limbo of James Taylor-style country ballads (A Letter Back), psychedelic blues-rock (Wild River), dreamlike lullabies (Lucky), and Southern boogies (Angel Of Death), all surpassing their model, whatever it was. Spirited and velvety over intricate harmonic tapestries, Darklands and Shattered Images hint at how Jefferson Airplane might have sounded had they evolved differently.

The lineup had by now stabilized around Bill Laswell (bass) and Nick Skopelitis (guitar), with only external contributions from Robert Kidney (ex-guitar and vocals of Numbers Band) and Amanda Kramer (ex-singer of Information Society).

Quintessence of rock hedonism, Fier’s drumming feels most at ease in the more “progressive” climates of crisis-era rock. Applying postmodern art principles, Fier creates a laboratory simulation of how the genre might have evolved. In this way, Fier emerges as the greatest heir of 1970s rock, the sound of Led Zeppelin and Little Feat.

Among the inventors of post-modern rock, Anton Fier is one of the most cynical, capable of employing any harmonic trick just to distort the most banal song. Under the name of the Golden Palominos, he created postmodern monuments, especially the first album and Visions Of Excess, before slightly losing his mind in the commercial attempts of Blast of Silence and A Dead Horse.

In Drunk With Passion (Venture, 1991), the first and second periods of his Golden Palominos face off: the more “ambient” and ethnic period versus the one more open to pop influences. Respectively, The Haunting (with Amanda Kramer on vocals and Nick Skopelitis on guitar) and Alive And Living Now (with Stipe on vocals and Richard Thompson on guitar), Thunder Cries (a percussive tour de force by Fier), and Dying From The Inside Out (a personal showcase by Bob Mould). In the end, the present wins, perhaps thanks to the guests who, unlike Fier, are great performers even if mediocre jugglers. Still, this remains the least successful work of the Palominos.

For This Is How It Feels (Restless, 1993), Fier surrounds himself with two former Parliament members, Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins, vocalists Lori Carson and Lydia Kavanaugh (with Amanda Kramer in the background), and the usual Laswell and Skopelitis (Matt Stein on computer and tapes). The album is primarily a concept record, inspired by a Graham Greene novel, and reflects in every note a sense of exotic tragedy. The music and lyrics (the latter by Carson, portraying a less provocative, more reflective Madonna) collaborate in an analytical study of melancholy and sexuality.
The singers deliver high-class performances, exploiting carefully studied rhythms, sighs, and pauses, made even more compelling by the mix (one can almost hear the sound of lips opening and the tongue touching the palate). They become exercises in diction more than traditional “singing”; yet, even more, it is the interplay of the two “dictions” that generates the ultimate meaning of the music. The title track is exemplary, with one voice weaving sighs and sobs while the other hums above innocently. In To A Stranger, one voice, colloquial, plays the part of a deceitful seductress while the other emits only breaths of voluptuous pleasure, surrounded by echoes and rhythms of an exotic environment. In The Wonder, the somber psalm of the first voice becomes almost irritating due to the second voice confessing its own amorous neuroses (the duet giving the impression that one is the conscience of the other). These sweet, insinuating, and mellifluous vocal harmonies primarily express sorrow, unhappiness, turmoil, and ultimately anguish. They are, in any case, the true protagonists of the tragedy. A Divine Kiss is almost the aesthetic manifesto of the genre.
Many songs thrive on seductive whispered monologues by a sensual woman: the understated blues of Sleepwalk (with Worrell’s Hammond unleashed in jazzy phrases) and the tender lullaby of I'm Not Sorry (perhaps the most heavenly melody in Fier’s career) seem to float down like feathers from infinite heights, brushing against the frenzied delirium of Prison Of The Rhythm, where whispering decays into subliminal hissing and the rhythm drives violently, finding a moment of relief only in the gospel of Bird Flying.
The arrangements are as meticulous as they are calculated: no note, chord, sample, or beat is wasted, out of place, intrusive, or redundant. Fier is first and foremost a scrupulous architect of his sonic constructions, surrounding himself with collaborators adept at manipulating their instruments and creating that slimy blend of seemingly disconnected sounds.
Ultimately, Fier may have found his definitive format: pleasing yet innovative, orderly and composed to the point of manic mannerism. This is a “classic” sound, which does not hesitate to lend itself to erudite digressions on the suggestive power of music.

Fier simultaneously recorded Dreamspeed (Disk Union, 1993), utilizing the razor-sharp guitars of Buckethead and Collins, Matt Stein’s samples and loops, Phew’s spoken performances, and Laswell’s bass (co-author of all the tracks). Here, Fier’s alter ego has free rein in torrid rhythmic calvaries (the title track, Cloud Without Water).

Intoxicated to the point of risking his life, Fier is one of the great “directors” of rock music, capable of “staging” practically any score his unruly genius chooses to attempt. His career is in fact a sequence of discontinuities, as each album stands entirely apart: experimental in the first Golden Palominos, rock in the second Visions Of Excess, dark in the third Blast Of Silence, commercial in A Dead Horse, completely overshadowed by alcohol in Drunk With Passion, philosophical in This Is How It Feels. Laswell and Skopelitis certainly contributed to these albums, but the true constant across these works, so isolated in rock history, is the investigation of the rhythmic quality of music—a pursuit Fier conducted quietly, without ever flaunting grandiose theories, yet no less astutely.

Pure (Restless, 1994) does not differ much from This Is How It Feels: Carson’s voice remains at the center of the songs, Skopelitis’s smoky guitar still provides support, and the formidable bass lines of Collins and Laswell continue to frame the rhythms. The limitation of the album, therefore, lies in repeating an already exhausted formula, even if Little Suicides and Pure may surpass all the songs from the previous record.

Dead Inside (Restless, 1996) is a kind of horror concept album written in collaboration with poet Nicole Blackman (who performs all the lyrics), entirely devoted to macabre themes, featuring gothic electronics that arguably represent the logical culmination of Anton Fier’s career. A couple of tracks (Ambitions Are, Thirst) update the sound to drum’n’bass, but the centerpiece is the chilling nightmare of Victim.

Blind Light (Alida, 1996), a collaboration with Bill Laswell, was the natural continuation of Dreamspeed. Its lengthy dub-oriented jams (The Absence of Time/Djeema el fna, Blind Light, Our Completion, Midnight) rediscovered melody but in a rather obnoxious manner.

Fier died in 2022 at the age of 66.