White Fence - Orange

Like a lightning strike that travels through time, 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.

Guitars sound and like a shower spray forth. Resolutely picked. Cold and soothing. Swiveling through the jagged, jittery pop sounds of the 1960s - 2000s, 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 magic 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.

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 them gleaming with clean electricity, and white (sometimes black-and-blue-eyed) soul.

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.

‘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 (and two 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.