Following close on the heels of Hair, White Fence & Ty Segall’s collaborative record, Tim Presley dishes up a two-volume set of sporadically written and recorded tunes that while often disparate on the track-by-track level, combine to form an all-encompassing sonic collage of sorts for White Fence’s brand of sunny, lo-fi, retro-radioactive L.A. rock. I dunno if it’s fair to call this record a magnum opus, but Presley’s clearly thrown every distant tape loop, distorted melody, garage-can beat and warbly lyric swirling in his ear crevices into the tape recorder for these releases. Separate in their LP forms, Vol. 1 covers tracks 1-14, and Vol. 2 the rest. But you couldn’t tell it from a full listen; the tunes sway seamlessly between rough-sewn garage rockers overlain with tweaked-out electric leads (“Swagger Vets”, “Long White Curtain”, “She Relief”) to harder-sewn punk jams (“Down PNX”, “Soaring”) to stoned summertime folk-rock sing- alongs (“It Will Never Be”, “Balance Your Heart”, “Groundskeeper”, “I’d Sing”, “Anna.”) The scent of the perfume comes out strongest in the way the songs transition, or fail to really, jabbing your ears with 2-second alternate interludes, sudden tape speed changes, etc. Something about the overall record’s eccentric intensity coupled with its lazy/hazy moments makes it the perfect record for hot, disorienting summer days. “Stomach Sexes” is easily my favorite, a song that kicks off with weird, atonal bubblegum-pop licks before settling into a country strummer about leaving “a desert man dry.”
