White Fence is a project we’ve followed for years, the most constant project name for the work of Tim Presley. Whist it’s easy to file White Fence’s discography as rock music, the actual surface of his music has moved through highly distinct phases.
After time, famously, as part of The Fall, and the main singer/songwriter in Darker My Love, White Fence was the chance for Presley to present his music exactly as he wanted. The early albums were a mess of lo-fi bedroom alchemy and whatever was near to hand. Tapes dragged and wobbled, sound was blown out and saturated. It was easy to see his music like a charmingly handmade, but twisted form of psychedelic rock.
There was even a wilder messy variant of his approach in the one-off mayhem of W-X. Two collaborations with Ty Segall, Hair and Joy – explored wide eyed grooves and tantalisingly fleeting vignettes. Two albums with Cate le Bon as Drinks, and another solo album produced by le Bon – The WiNK, that removed all the clutter from his sound. His most recent release, I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk, somehow gathered all these threads. A sprawling heartfelt release that collected everything he’d achieved up to that point. Presley seems to be endlessly fascinated by how different results can be squeezed out of his song writing and bounced around by studio and production. His porous music delights in the way it’s further sculpted by the hands of those involved.
We spoke to Presley a few years back and he shared that songwriting was ‘like putting tuxedos on ugly words’. His songs often feel like surreal distortions of everyday life, observations on a magic in mundane things, moments drawn in clarity and confusion.
Here at OBLADADA, it’s never really been about the specifics of the song lyrics but it’s clear every scene he draws is an actual a moment in time, a story. So, it’s fair to say, after a 7 year wait, it’s fascinating to see where things land on his new album Orange.
Our first listens confirmed this new album sits somewhere new in the White Fence landscape. Perhaps not surprisingly, sonically it’s closest to For the Recently Found Innocent, which makes sense given it was also produced by Segall.
11 tracks, densely packed jangly pop gems. Late 60’s garage rock, beamed through an 80’s filter, and then a 2026 one, encased in a weird slow burning coating. Initially, the album coasted by, a pleasant if uniform group of tunes, but slowly as always, the music reveals weird details and welcomes you inside.
There is a sense Presley’s had a heavy time of late. Whilst he’s been focussed in part on his other passion of painting, here in Orange, he navigates or certainly namechecks heartache, suicide, addiction. The first line on the opening track That’s Where The Money Goes (Seen From The Celestial Realm) wastes no time – ‘I just had an experience with God’.
I Came Close, Orange For Luck, the title track of sorts, is all jangling grooves, muffles and echoes that eventually crumbles then blooms into warped space whispers…
As the album opens up, there are flashes of The Kinks, Love, The Byrds, early Roxy Music and glam phase Eno. A dense sound from the weirdest extremity of normal.
Your Eyes and Given Up My Heart feel like tunes Presley could have dropped any time in the last 10 years. Unread Books is a downbeat hymn dusted in oily synth patterns. Reflections In A Shop Window On Polk is full of spiralling la la la la las. So Beautiful, perhaps the initially prettiest sounding track here, actually delivers the darkness lyrics. An ode to a past love perhaps, ‘she’s so beautiful, but oh so boring’, and the fact ‘I’d never considered suicide before’…
When the Animals Come Back is a chugging rocker and the closer, Blind Your Sun sounds like a return to the tape looped mayhem made a shade more radio friendly.
It’s easy to imagine Orange was probably an odd album to make. 11 songs exhumed from the intervening 7 years since his last release. For Presley who always seemed highly productive, it’s felt like an age.
Orange is an album we are glad is here, maybe it’s a weird half step away from the crazier stuff he’s done previously, that we adore. But then we remember that this continual shapeshifting is actually at the heart of what we love about him.
Whatever we say, it’s undeniably good to have Tim back in our ears, and Orange is another 38 minutes of music to add to the stack we already have, and continually revisit.
We are reminded yet again, his music has always been impossible to pin down. Albums roll around in our attention, tracks pass you by then hit you hard, new details come out of nowhere, words and phrases suddenly emerge after dozens of listens.
Trying to consume this in a hurry feels a bit effective or unnatural somehow. This Orange reacts best to being squeezed slowly…
Orange is out today (24th April) on Drag City, and is available on vinyl and digital here and here
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