This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Fingerpainting is as apt a description as any for the music of experimental rocker Mayo Thompson: It’s messy and disorganized, crudely drawn with broad strokes and vivid colours, yet still retains a rough, simple beauty.
After 34 years and who knows how many albums of his avant-weird, post-everything collage-rock — free-association lyrics, delicate streaming melodies, challenging sonic freakouts, ambiently recorded noodling — Fingerpainting finds Mayo coming full circle, recycling songs rejected from his 1966 debut. And even the ’90s musicians (including Gastr Del Sol’s David Grubbs and fIREHOSE’s George Hurley), technologies and sensibilities at work here only prove that the more Thompson changes, the more he stays the same.
