Paint - PAINT (2018)

The verb, the noun, the substance, the action, the command: make a mark! With that, PAINT (guitarist/singer Pedrum Siadatian of the Allah-Las), is making his mark too with his first, self-titled solo record. PAINT started by four-tracking his own strange, slow-growing ideas just after Allah-Las third album Calico Review (2016) - fed or led by a certain acid-bitter poetry (Gregory Corso and John Lennon) and the murky music of Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett. Siadatian found a producer and partner-in-grime in adept cinematic psychedelicist Frank Maston, who instinctively understood these songs would fall apart if scrubbed too roughly in the studio. Now PAINT's self-titled debut LP has a happily paradoxical finished-but-not-finished-off feel, like Lou Reed and R. Stevie Moore and Julian Cope and Richard Hell, but just the songs that never came out. Like "Daily Gazette": big-city-on-the-skids mid-tempo hot-summer punk blues cool like those Richard Hell/Tom Verlaine Neon Boys tapes. Like "Splattered": a subway-sound Velvet Underground valentine. Like "Silver Streaks": budget-studio 1970s expression-as-obsession from the California observed and preserved by demimonde private-press psychedelicists Damon or F.J. McMahon. Like "Wash": a last-dance cosmic waltz that could've been a snippet of an Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack. Anyway, this is PAINT, the substance and the action - it drips, it runs, it changes colors. In between: not the desert but the dirt, not the night but the dark, not the sun but the heat and not the sea but the deep, and always the heartbeat blood-rush feel-it! momentum that makes all rock 'n' roll rock and roll. Think of it this way: PAINT's first album isn't always clean, but it's very very clear. Sometimes the mess is the message.