On last year’s DRINKS, Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon threw out the rock rulebook and forged their own scrappy tools of invention. Wielding their guitars like crudely hewn spades, the newly formed duo tilled indiscriminately through history, splicing krautrock with hippie folk and welding inside jokes to piercing proto-synths. Partially inspired by Soul Jazz’s Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing As Society Vol 2 compilation, the agitated vibe mussed Le Bon’s usual tidy surfaces on this year’s Crab Day, and returns to scare every trace of classic rock out of Tim Presley’s solo debut, The Wink, which Le Bon produces.
Over the course of their six albums to date, Presley’s shaggy classicists White Fence have marched ever closer to something resembling clarity. The Wink is also a clean listen, but significantly starker than White Fence fans might expect, trading jet-thrusting psychedelia for the rickety twang common to “Bike”-era Pink Floyd, post-punk anarchists, and the Fiery Furnaces at their most ornery. Throughout, Presley seems like the willing supplicant to Le Bon’s autodidact.
Although it starts with an interlude that suggests seals welcoming you to a séance, The Wink is a more coherent and approachable record than DRINKS. As Presley’s songwriting comes back into focus after that wigged-out record, he seems both damaged and reinvigorated, his atonal guitar and nervy register often exuding an appealing, hen-pecked panic. On these harder moments, Le Bon chucks in curveballs to up the ante, like the dabbles of vaudeville piano on the title track, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa’s trolley-crash emphases on “Solitude Cola,” and the slack saxophone on “ER” that billows like a deflated Airdancer. The disparate elements combine to something resembling a riff from Presley’s track “Clue,” albeit one that also evokes Television attacking an obstacle course.
Presley’s abstract impressionism is surprising and rich with detail, though there are gentler life rafts here as respite from the madness. “I can’t wait to write to you, love of my life!” he swoons on the amiable “Goldfish Wheelchair” (where the Californian sounds suspiciously Welsh). “All done!” he declares, as if he’s just plopped his note in the letterbox. Presley’s lyrics are mostly inscrutable streams of consciousness that are meaningful to him alone, but the occasional plainspoken tenderness leaps out like a shooting star: “And I’ve whittled my sticks/And my love cannot miss,” he chants on “Long Bow,” “It’s a long bow/Pull tight.”
The Wink is a high-wire act that may find more fans among, say, free jazz listeners than conventional rock lovers. But even if the scratchy destination lacks home comforts, the journey is its own thrill. In DRINKS, Le Bon and Presley tore up the rules; on The Wink, they set about rewriting them to their own addictive whims.
