The Lost Gem

Tim Presley’s one-man band White Fence has only been around since 2010, but his debut self-titled album is already being re-issued. This follows the recent White Fence release Cyclops Reap and a collaboration with Ty Segall called Hair. Originally released on Make A Mess Records, Segall’s own label, called God?, which is a side-label of Chicago’s Drag City Records (Pavement, Joanna Newsom), will re-issue White Fence, this time with a pink cover instead of the original yellow.

Presley, based in California, began White Fence as an experimental side project. Having come from punk and psych-rock bands, he managed to fuse the two to form his own mess of tunes. Songs range from fast-paced fuzzy rock to toned-down and slow-moving tracks. “Ring Around a Square” is a quieter, ’60s-esque lo-fi song with a crisp acoustic guitar, and “Hard Finish on Mirror Mile” begins with quirky guitar strums but changes into a charming melody.

But other tracks, such as “Destroy Everything” and “Box Disease – Today Bond” are anything but quiet.  “Destroy Everything” turns up the volume and fills any empty seconds with reverb, while “Box Disease” is fifty-four seconds of something resembling a lo-fi sing-along punk song.

For someone as hard-working as Tim Presley, you can generally bet that anything he’s created or produced is at the very least a decent product. And while White Fence is his first stab at a solo project, he still managed to churn out a great lo-fi psych-rock album with some very interesting instrumentation choices.