On Hair, his recent collaborative LP with Ty Segall, California psych-rock lifer Tim Presley benefited from a dose of semi-pro-studio botox. A home-recording primitivist of the Bob Pollard variety, Presley, who works under the name White Fence, shrouds his wiggly stoner gems in a curtain of tape hiss, distortion, and woozy effects. In comparison, Hair-- which was recorded in an honest-to-goodness studio-- might as well be Steely Dan's Aja. Guitar hooks crackle and shimmer, rather than just crackle.
But for those who prefer Presley's paisley-tinted jangling with a hint of static, there's plenty to go around on Family Perfume. Whittled down from an alleged cache of 80 songs, Family Perfume gathers Presley's favorite efforts from a year spent crouched over a 4-track recorder. Sometimes that means gentle hooks. Sometimes it means spinning sideways through backwards tape effects.
At this point, Presley's earned his 50-mission crush cap in trippy music. He's been a member of goth-tinged space-rock outfit Darker My Love, a back-up player in Austin garage-pop group the Strange Boys, and, most randomly, a touring guitarist in the Fall (circa Reformation Post TLC). But White Fence is his most consistent project to date. Working sans bandmates, he's evolved an eerie and elastic take on the melodies of baby boomer teen-hood; sampling *Nuggets-*era drum breaks and looping them to form the foundation for skewed guitar pop that isn't shy about cribbing some chord progressions from the Kinks, Buffalo Springfield, and Pink Floyd. Like his neo-psych peers-- Woods, Sic Alps, and Segall-- Presley finds melodic inspiration in classic rock, but blurs his reference points toward punk by coating the music in lo-fi grit. His third proper album, Family Perfume, doubles down on those zonked out inclinations.
Vol. 1, which arrived in early April, is the most consistent of the pair. The melodies bend and warble, but generally cohere into recognizable structures. "Swagger Vets & Double Moon" takes an in-the-red stab at glam rock. "Do You Know Ida Know?" augments a marching beat with eerily pitch-shifted backing vocals. Meanwhile, Presley drops couplets that sound like Donovan trying to recap the plot of Repo Man. The 1960s may inform the riffs, but White Fence's lyrics aren't the stuff of nostalgia. At least, not for the summer of love. Presley's splintered narratives and word salads mostly call to mind his former bandmate, Mark E. Smith: "A Detroit factory so black and melted/ Stands a better chance than the farmers' pollen/ In a field of grey concrete and you know it will never be," sings Presley on the surrealist break-up ballad, "It Will Never Be".
From there, it just gets weirder. Vol. 2 dive-bombs deeper into the zonked-out ephemera, letting the outré tape noises and sound effects hold center stage. The retro-rock reference point makes a noticeable slip from West Coast hippie fare toward the rubbery harmonies of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Presley embraces the technical foibles of his recording gear-- stopping and starting takes to create confusing blends between songs. He gets loose with the playback speed control, giving his tunes the shape-shifting impermanence of oil globs burbling through a lava lamp.
And sometimes, he just speaks his mind. On "Be at Home", Presley uses a head-nodding loop to reflect upon co-habitation, including thoughts about "the room I go to while you wash underwear in the sink." You know, lest you think he's taking the whole hermetic home-recording and 'illicit substances as a path toward transcendence' thing too seriously.
