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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, selftitled 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.

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Daily Gazette
3. Plastic Dreams
4. Moldy Man
5. Silver Streaks
6. True Love (Is Hard To Find)
7. Splattered
8. Just Passin Thru'
9. I Didn't Know A Thing
10. Heaven In Farsi
11. Wash
12. Outro/Corso