Tim Presley, as White Fence, may be productive, but he is nowhere near as productive as his regular musical ally Ty Segall, who seems to knock out a new album every six months. A full seven years have passed since the last White Fence record, I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk. While that was still highly psychedelic, trippy and unhinged, and the collaborative albums with Segall, Hair and Joy, were garage rock soaked at times in fuzz and at others just as psychedelic, Orange is now a straight-lined, clean and catchy retro-pop album. The Rickenbacker jingle-jangle is rooted as deeply in the sound of the sixties as Presley’s vocal melodies, even if the guitar lines on »I Came Close, Orange For Luck« sound more like Johnny Marr and The Smiths.
As a Californian, Presley may sing on »Your Eyes« of a »sidewalk made of stars«, yet White Fence still obviously sounds like British bands of the 1960s – only for Orange, early Pink Floyd appear to have been swapped for The Kinks. As tongue in cheek as many Kinks lyrics, Presley manages, despite the sunny, positive vibes, to accommodate themes such as loss or addiction, and indeed covers Simply Red’s nasty ballad »So Beautiful«. And since there has, at least for as long as Presley has been making music – since the mid-1990s – always been a sixties revival happening somewhere, the White Fence sound is slowly becoming simply timeless. Ty Segall, incidentally, was once again responsible for that sound – and the drums. He really cannot sit still…
Orange
