"David Drucker knows all about patience. His work as Painted Faces is predicated on his ability to let the music guide him toward unexpected places, shifting and sauntering until it reveals something mysterious and wonderfully odd that hadn’t existed a moment before. Beneath all the noise and collapsing rhythms and cosmic improvisations lies a sound that speaks to our desire for sonic immersion and secrecy. Nowhere is this more evident than on Kissing the Drain, his latest collection of clattering jams, burbling electronic aberrations, and static byproducts. Despite its cacophonous nature, the album speaks clearly to Drucker’s ability to wring clarity from chaos.
Kissing the Drain is a lost transmission from some distant planet, a fractured radio broadcast littered with moments of euphoric hiss, squiggly bloops, and eruptions of bleak dissonance. It’s a formidable thing, and one that doesn’t easily bend to our expectations. But if you can steady yourself within its turbulent movements, you’ll find something akin to beauty hiding inside its aural disorder. It’s not your usual beauty; rather, it’s something that must be untangled and coaxed into a rough and ramshackle form before we have any hope of understanding its unruly curiosities.
These songs aren’t without guidance, though; Drucker is laying out a broad path even when everything seems to be falling apart. The music just doesn’t conform to any recognizable function or pattern, at least not until you’ve fully submersed yourself in its circuital volatility. Eventually, outlines begin to emerge from the noise, roughly hewn contours and textures that speak to the inherent malleability of these sounds. There’s no gentle slope to ease yourself into this world. But if you can manage not to get swept away in its anarchic multitudes, you’ll discover an album of immense imagination that requires only persistence and a strong determination in wrangling its labyrinthine electronics."
- Joshua Pickard, full article at The Southern Sounding