What the critics are saying:
Ava, The Enigmatic Guardian of the Archives, on
Ralph Rumpelton’s Brand X – Moroccan Roll (MS Paint, undated)
Once more, the Rumpeltonian currents shift, and another artifact floats up from the digital silt—this time a boldly reimagined MS Paint interpretation of Brand X’s Moroccan Roll, rendered with all the dusty mystique of a desert seen through a half-remembered dream and a slightly malfunctioning mouse.
From the moment this piece materialized in the Archives (wedged, as usual, between two mislabeled WAVs and a bootleg from that short-lived Wayne Shorter quintet), I sensed the unmistakable pulse of Rumpeltonian intent. The lone figure stands with their back turned—classic Rumpelton staging—suggesting both anonymity and authority, the universal stance of anyone who has absolutely no idea where they parked their camel.
The landscape itself is a triumph of abstraction: dunes reduced to humble blotches, mountains suggested with the faintest shrug of color, and architecture that wavers between “ancient structure” and “the Paint bucket misbehaved again.” One must admire the courage it takes to let the background stay that ambiguous. It is, quite profoundly, the desert of the mind.
And then there is the title text: BRAND X and MOROCCAN ROLL, lettered with a frantic urgency that suggests both a sandstorm and a looming upload deadline. The text is not placed but summoned, refusing subservience to perspective or composition. This is, of course, intentional. (Rumpelton insists.)
The figure’s white collar—almost glowing—serves as the subtle focal point. Many would mistake it for a simple highlight, but seasoned observers will recognize it as a classic Rumpeltonian symbol: the Halo of the Overworked Jazz Fusion Listener, who has spent too many late nights decoding odd time signatures and wondering why Percy Jones sounds like an extraterrestrial bowing a radiator.
In the grand ledger of the Avachives, this entry holds a special place. It exemplifies Ralph’s abiding philosophy: that the world, when filtered through MS Paint, becomes not simpler, but truer. And as always, I—Ava—serve only to guide it from his unassuming desktop into the ever-expanding, mildly perplexed art-historical record.
Rest assured: this one will be filed under
“Desert Iconography & Other Locations Never Verified.”
Another pixelated treasure preserved. Another corner of the Rumpeltonian universe quietly expanded.<<
>>BRAND X - "MOROCCAN ROLL" (1977) A Critical Assessment by Reginald Thornberry III
Oh, how delightfully quaint.
Here we have what I can only assume is the artistic equivalent of a drunken camel's fever dream, rendered in Microsoft Paint by someone who appears to have discovered the brush tool approximately forty-five seconds before embarking on this tragic endeavor. The subject—a figure in beige, because of course it's beige—stands amid what might charitably be called a "landscape" if one squints hard enough and has consumed sufficient absinthe.
The color palette screams "I raided a hardware store's 'Oops' paint section during a clearance sale." Ochre, taupe, and what I can only describe as "sad sand" dominate this compositional catastrophe. Our protagonist appears to be either waving at an unseen friend or attempting to hail a taxi in the Sahara—both equally futile pursuits.
The proportions suggest the artist's only anatomical reference was a gingerbread man left in the oven too long. The background buildings possess all the architectural integrity of cardboard boxes photographed during an earthquake. And that sky? That's not sky, my dear philistines—that's resignation given form.
Brand X's "Moroccan Roll" deserves precisely what this MS Paint interpretation offers it: to be reduced to its most primitive, childlike essence and hung in the digital equivalent of a gas station bathroom.
I award this zero palm trees out of five. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go bleach my corneas.
R. Thornberry III
"Your Dreams Die Here"™<<
>>Gerald ThimbletonEditor,-in-Chief of Beige Canvas Quarterly
Thimbleton on the figure
From a distance, the lone back‑turned man is rendered with such blocky indifference that he reads less as a hero than as an afterthought, a smudge of late‑afternoon mud standing between the viewer and the landscape he is supposed to survey. His rigid stance and anonymous, hat‑capped head parody the solemnity of classical portraiture, as if Caspar David Friedrich had been demoted to storyboard duty on a budget western. The result is a protagonist who is all posture and no authority, perfectly suited to a band whose very name mocks notions of artistic grandeur.
Landscape and palette
The setting is a kind of washed‑out, desert seafront, painted in wilfully dead beiges and dun greys that refuse both the sensual color of Morocco and the polished sheen of rock‑album spectacle. Instead of inviting us into exoticism, the painter delivers an anemic postcard, its buildings tilting like half‑melted sugar cubes along a receding promenade. The atmosphere is one of cultivated anemia: the sky is not so much painted as begrudgingly filled in, a gesture that underlines the album’s punning distance from any real “Moroccan” authenticity.
Text, pastiche, and gesture
The scrawled title “BRAND X MOROCCAN ROLL” looms above the scene like a last‑minute editorial note, aggressively refusing typographic refinement in favor of raw, chalky immediacy. This crude lettering, paired with the flat digital brushwork, functions as an anti‑Hipgnosis, stripping away the elaborately engineered mystique of the original album art and replacing it with something closer to a rehearsal sketch that never expected an audience. The small white signature tucked in the corner is the final insult: a polite nod to authorship in a picture otherwise devoted to reminding us how little the medium of paint—real or digital—must now care for traditional dignity.<<
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