White Fence is songwriter Tim Presley’s love letter to Love…and Syd Barrett and Nilsson and Dylan and The Zombies.
As rock retro-isms go, White Fence has gone the distance and created a time capsule as time bomb.
The hallucinatory, warbly lo-fi recordings sound as if they’d been recorded in 1968 and vaccuum sealed until now. Unlike lots of other bands playing an “update” to Stoned psychedelia or Southern Blooz or AM Gold Americana, White Fence isn’t updating anything. The tracks recorded in Echo Park within the last 2 years, quite literally sound like haunting lysergic transmissions from another era.
“King of the Decade” has a Dylanesque twang and a chorus of “Rock n Roll Forever” but the piece de resistance is the damaged tape warble that gives the whole thing the sound of a cassette left on a dashboard too long.
Stream “King of the Decade” below and download it here.
Their soon-to-be released double album Family Perfume is so true to the sounds of that time that it somehow forgoes nostalgia and becomes something else altogether, it just “be” the thing.
Apparently, when not out doing shows, Presley professes to just holing himself up in his Echo Park apartment feeding his cats and writing songs. Maybe he doesn’t have that many cats, because he does have about a zillion songs. So many songs that he’s not only releasing a double album (with volumes out in April and May) but also an album called “Hair“, which is a collaboration with Ty Segall (out at the end of April).
— Mario Cotto