I don’t normally hawk my own artistic output on this blog, but I’m going to make an exception over the next couple of weeks. You see, it’s been exactly 20 years today since my partner in crime Wiley Wells (check out his amazing new album here) and I released our album Palindrome, which remains one of the accomplishments I am most proud of. Sure, relatively few people ever actually listened to it — although it did generate a bit of interest at the time, Wiley and I split shortly after the release for the typical reasons that bands break up, and without us playing regular shows the record just sort of evaporated after a while. But despite that, the album accomplished what I intended of it, which was basically to get out of my system some kind of artistic mind virus that had been obsessing me for years. Whatever its merits from a musical perspective, the album was a spiritual victory for me, and I like to think you can hear the passion we put into it when you listen to the songs even after so many years.
The album was, I suppose, a sort of concept album, as cringe as that can sometimes be. The theme was one of cyclical death and rebirth, symbolized through the turning of seasons and also through the idea of palindromes, which are character strings that are the same forward as backward (e.g., tacocat). We released the album on 20-11-02, a palindromic date. We were essentially invoking a Spenglerian vision of civilizational cycles, embodied in an extended metaphor of the birth, violent life, spiritual collapse, and obscure, lonely death of an unnamed person. I guess none of this was really explicit in any of the tracks, but you can sort of tease it out of the lyrics if you know what we were thinking about when we wrote the thing.
Anyway, for the sake of posterity I will write more about some of my favorite individual tracks from this record over the coming weeks. Today, we have put together a 20th anniversary downloadable edition on Bandcamp that has three older bonus tracks, including what I think might be the best song I ever wrote. Maybe you listen? Maybe you share? I can promise you that any money we get from downloads will go to subversive causes furthering our slide into, and beyond, the Global American Empire’s Spenglerian winter.
The Antisocial Darwinist 