Orange by White Fence

Like a lightning strike that travels through time – is there a word for that? – White Fence are all of a sudden cracking in the hear-view mirror again. Orange hits like, visceral. White hot and cold, a zombie Rhinestone Dwight Twilley Cowboy – but with each Rickenbackin’ chime, the ticking of the clock jingle-jangles White Fence in fresh time. Ruthless!

Guitars sound and like a shower spray forth. Resolutely picked. Cold and soothing. Shellodic (the melody in a shell, duh!). Swivelin’ thru the jagged, jittery pop sounds of the 60s-00000s, the sharped focus of Orange’s rock sonics gives Tim Presley exactly what he needed the most: open space to sing into, and songs to sing. The rest is White Fence magik at its most dark, as Tim's restless free-allusivation trippifyingly transforms the cramped confines of heart wracked self-excoriation right before our eyes and ears! In pop songs.

On (the mixing) board with White Fence/on the (drum) kit with Tim is Ty Segall (also producer of For the Recently Found Innocent, the last solo White Fence album). Engineering tactics fully hand-in-glove with the White Fence intent, they produce a clean and uncrowded space to mount up all the rock ‘n balladry, their clean lines surrounded by an emphatic/unalterable (minimalist) frame. These are hits! All of ‘em gleaming with clean electricity, and white (sometimes black-and-blue-eyed) soul. Hard water and power held in stylish reserve: “Your Eyes,” “Given Up My Heart,” “Unread Books,” “Evaporating Love” number among the many highlights.

Tim’s lyric sets and chord progressions, with their perspectives, time codes and smash cuts, give up eleven fleeting glimpses from the other side of the 'Fence, each outfitted as foot-forward pop tunes for maximum rock ‘n roll. On the “title” tune, “I Came Close, Orange For Luck,” the lyrics’ dire implication, blurred sumptuously by Tim’s eerie falsetto, twist strands of dread into the sunshiny college rock, sharing sum space with old schoolboys, The Smiths, while straying, an outcast of its own kind. Or the Lennon vibes of "Unread Books," operating through carefully twisted Presley wires. Production polarities on point! Playing with genre throughout the album like a space-age Kinks, Tim’s natty wordplay splatters against the songs' rock-solid edifice, spilling an infinitum of cracked, shaggy realities, billowing, mirrored, sharded. When it all moves, you move, and that’s fun, so long as you savor the deep impact of a couplet from “I Wanted a Rolex”:

“It’s the ocean sized desire/Impossible to satisfy."

Tim offers this post-op 'as-per' for Orange:

“Love/loss, addiction/rehabilitation, and a good long look in the mirror (by way of a shop window reflection in San Francisco).

But also the absurdity of life..... I wanted to sing my little heart out. Sing life”

Orange is an unstill life; a bowlful of Tim’s latest conceptions for guitar band, grown larger through thoughts, feelings, SONGS and some keys and synth from Alice Sandhal (+ 2 drum cameos from the ever-righteous Dylan Hadley!). A trance-like chronology of consciousness, captured in opalescent diamond tightness and ice fidelity at Ty’s Harmonizer II studio. It’s a KILLER. White Fence is Orange on time this time!

Conceived of as an alternative vehicle for the songwriting of Tim Presley in the final days of Darker My Love, White Fence took flight in 2010, releasing six insanely great modern pop albums through 2014 on Woodsist, Castleface and Drag City. After a break for other projects, I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk appeared in 2019, credited to Tim Presley & White Fence.