Painted Faces - Normal Street

Format: LP
Catalogue No.: ESP5058LP
Barcode: 8254815005819
Release Date: 28 Apr 2023
Genre: Indie/Alternative

Standard weight black vinyl

When David Drucker of Painted Faces begins to write and record, every dumb sign, bad horror movie, seemingly innocuous turn of phrase, petty embarrassment, transcendent joke, and musical influence are drawn together like iron filings to a magnet. What results is a document of a particular point in time for the artist. There are infectiously haunting hooks and raw atonal passages, cheap synths (and as time goes on less cheap ones), simple but effective chords, ramshackle percussion (a plastic toy maraca passed among audience members that refuses to die), and a host of other elements that all add up to something very special and deeply personal. It’s a portrait of the artist as a freak.

On his latest album, Normal Street, the story continues. The title track opens with a nebulous cloud of beeps and squeals which slowly give way to more solid melodic form. Drucker, always searching for ever freakier and liberated pastures, walks a particularly unique line between unpredictably risky experimentation and skillful songcraft. It’s this interplay hat makes Painted Faces truly original and exciting. What “works” is totally relative, and through his long honed practice of trying things, he has created his own sonic vocabulary.

Normal Street is a fractured collection of songs, sounds, ideas, sometimes brief and other times delicately sustained; its stream of consciousness mischievousness bringing to mind Zappa and the Mothers filtered through the angst of bedroom pop and tape label minimalism.

TRACKLISTING
A1 Normal Street
A2 An American Werewolf In Ridgewood
A3 Paranoid Dollhouse
A4 Forest Techno
A5 Playing The Field: The Ambassador Prowls
A6 Cult Of The Ghost Shark
B1 Laughing Charlie
B2 Watching Tremors 2 At Work
B3 Contact Mind
B4 Xea