The album's final suite, 'In My Baby's Ruth/ Freeform Freakout 4' is the type of post-everything thrum that Thompson has always excelled at: absurdist lyrics, barely recognizable post-rock guitar phrases, a legion of pot-bangers gathered around him, a cloistered love-in that would get you booted from all but the most accepting hippie communes. The songs, at their best, are drone-y and nervous- 'Vile Vile Grass' and 'Mother'- and, at their worst, tuneless and misshapen- 'Bad Medicine' and 'There There Betty Betty'. The slow, cartoonish beats are the programming equivalent of Thompsons' guitar playing: simple, posed amateurism. Mayo's guitar is rough and gray and predictable, like a sidewalk, but its crude interplay with the electronic boil- presumably provided mostly by the Chicago folks- is pleasantly reminiscent of a time when 'guitars + electronics' was not manifest destiny for every young rock band with Fruity Loops and an Aphex Twin album. Thompson's approximations of 'proper' songs benefit most from the remastering, lifting his plain, familiar voice above his band's bookish clatter. O'Rourke wisely pares down noisiest, wordless bits, converting bullshit improvisations with names like 'The Greed of a Clarinet That Is Puffy From Crying Gets Tossed in Butter and Spread by Notes' into tolerable interludes (and re-tabbing them, in the style of Parable, as 'Freeform Freakout' volumes). (Here, let me save you some trouble: the rhythmic sync-up isn't quite as hellacious as you might think, but it otherwise sounds very much like you would expect two-and-a-half distinct Red Krayola albums to sound when played simultaneously.) Adding insult to.insult, Fingerpointing's modest improvements on Fingerpainting come packaged as one continuous track, wagering that O'Rourke's pruning and primping are worth the loss of self-editing.įingerpointing's presentation is silliness and arrogance on a grand scale, but O'Rourke does improve on Fingerpainting, and in doing so encourages a rethinking of the album's maligned status. Fingerpainting, the 1999 Red Krayola album that resulted from Thompsons work with David Grubbs, Stephen Prina, et al.

Avant-garde artists are often forgiven their worst sins- the world has turned a blind eye to Faust's post-1990 material, for example- but it's unlikely anyone is going to absolve the Red Krayola for releasing a 40-minute 'remix' nearly a decade after the fact, much less so telling fans that the remix, the original album, and the Red Krayola debut Parable of Arable Land can be played simultaneously, Zaireeka-style, despite three different run-times and Parable having been recorded nearly 30 years prior to Fingerpainting with a separate group of musicians. The Red Krayola began in the 60s as the brainchild of psychedelic weirdo Mayo Thompson.

Red Krayola Fingerpainting Rar