White Fence For The Recently Found Innocent & Show # 520

Tim Presley has been recording albums as White Fence since 2010, but until now Presley himself has recorded all of them on a 4 track at his home. For his sixth full-length outing, Presley enlisted the services of fellow prolific garage rock cohort Ty Segall and headed to his garage studio. The two first collaborated on 2012’s Hair, but on the album For The Recently Found Innocent Segall takes the producer seat and the drummer seat for a few tracks. The gritty lo-fi atmosphere that once dominated White Fence’s previous albums has cleared up a bit here, but the warbled sounds we once heard on previous White Fence bedroom 4 track recordings still loom with an underlying presence throughout this album. This album wasn’t a deliberate attempt to clean up Presley’s sound as Ty Segall recently explained in LA Weekly: "They weren't trying to sound shitty, they were trying to sound as rad as they could with limited resources. If you're trying to make a shitty mic sound great you're doing the right thing." He also continues in the same article mentioning that on this album "It's all Tim, it's just captured in a different way."

For The Recently Found Innocent opens with the track “The Recently Found” which serves as slow syrupy psychedelic introduction to the album before launching into “Anger! Who Keeps You Under?” This song is an upbeat psychedelic track with warm sounding drums, thick basslines and kaleidoscope sounding guitar rhythms, as Presley sings with lazy vocal lines loaded with trippy echo effects. “Like That” was the lead off single prior to this album’s release and the song itself takes his psychedelic pop sounds mixing in elements of early Who, The Kinks and sugary falsetto vocals that lyrically portray tongue-in-cheek lyrics. “Sandra (When The Earth Dies)” portrays post-apocalyptic imagery with lyrics such as “All the junkies left to cry/All the junkies wave goodbye/Laugh and cry/Heavy to light”. The song’s darker images juxtapose with the song’s infectious church-like organ and musical elements, which seem to echo the influence of Donovan.

“Wolf Gets Red Faced” lyrically seems to provide images of an alcoholic werewolf as musically it takes on sounds compared to Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Beatles White Album. “Arrow Man” portrays a nostalgic feeling once again pulling in 60s influences, this time from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, but at the same time it blends swirls of distortion in the background not sounding like a copy of the band that seemingly influenced it, instead it stands on its own displaying Presley’s song writing abilities. “Actor” draws its inspiration from The Byrds, “Hard Water” is catchy dream pop while “The Light” and “Paranoid Bait” are fuzzed out garage rock. These two tracks are executed here as some of the sounds on Hair had been, displaying moments of higher energies, definitely taking Segalls influence into consideration.

Aesthetically, For The Recently Found Innocent finds a balance between the last two releases from White Fence, 2013’s Cyclops Reap and Live In San Francisco, the later of which was an album that showcased White Fence in a full band and in a more revved up fashion. The album features not only Segall on some drum tracks, but also Nick Murray from White Fence’s live band further connecting his last set of releases. On the album’s front cover we see a painted self-portrait of Presley, not unlike Bob Dylan’s own self-portrait cover image from the 1970 album Self Portrait, but those two albums only have a connection with the artwork, not the music. We can see the same gritty canvas beneath the smeared messy painting on the cover, it is still the same White Fence. On For The Recently Found Innocent, Presley has merely stepped out of his home and upgraded to a more proper studio environment utilizing an 8 track recorder (instead of a 4 track) with the help of Ty Segall and in the process, displays a new type of innocence.


Saturday Night Play List:

1. The White Stripes - Stop Breaking Down
2. Muddy Waters - The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock and Roll (Number 2)
3. Reigning Sound - My My
4. Small Teeth - Party Shame
5. Love - A Motel Is Not A House
5. The Gruesomes - Cry In The Night
6. The Ugly Beats - Throw Me A Line
7. Richard Hell & the Voidoids - Liars Beware
8. Mission Of Burma - The Enthusiast
9. Army Navy - The Mistakes
10. Kestrels - Eternal And Debased
11. Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Surfer Joe And Moe The Sleaze
12. The Mark Inside - The Coming Of Age At The End Of Days
13. King Cobb Steelie - Time=Money & Money=Pizza ∴ Time=Pizza.
14. The Velvet Underground - Foggy Notion
15. Frog Eyes - Your Holiday Treat
16. White Fence - Actor
17. White Fence - Paranoid Bait
18. Dead Ghosts - When It Comes To You
19. The Survivors - Baby Come Back
20. Iggy Pop - Tiny Girls
21. Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks - Little Fang
22. Devo - The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprise

To download this weeks program, visit CJAM's schedule page for Revolution Rock and download the file for August 2. Or subscribe to Revolution Rock as a Podcast.