Hopefully you really enjoy sixties flower-pop revival. Hopefully you also really enjoy uniquely bizarre, unpredictably textured psychosomatic sound. Otherwise, unless you wish to engage on a thirty-six minute lysergic misadventure that doesn’t first require the imbibition of a physical substance, I cannot say I have much to promote about Cyclops Reap, the new album from Los Angeles’ one-man band White Fence aka Tim Presley that unflaggingly embraces its combinatory vision of hazy nostalgia and irruptive lo-fi eccentricity.
To start off there’s the rapturous flatulence of “Pink Gorilla” and the fuzzy blurts of funk-jam in “Chairs in the Dark,” sounds which persistently intrude and envelope a dutiful flavor of vintage pop. But the strangeness doesn’t stop there; “New Edinburgh” is razed with scratchy distortion and assaulted by tweaky, screaming textures. “White Cat” is a typical sixties song sent through a hallucinatory space-warp, while the lotus-love of “Run By the Same” features backing vocals that sound absurdly like a dying cartoon character.
Perhaps musical oddities aren’t everyone’s thing, but the sixties-sound revival is well-done and worth appreciating. “Beat” calms things down with a bluesy guitar and wandering lyrics voiced in stage-whispers. “Trouble is Trouble Never Seen” masters the pacifying floatiness of Beatles-era vocals. “Live on Genevieve” has an irresistibly catchy refrain with appropriately trippy imagery, while “To The Boy I Jumped in The Hemlock Alley” spins through some too-groovy moments. Probably the best tracks come towards the end with “Make them Dinner at our Shoes” and “Only Man Alive.” Both adopt a less-is-more approach, dropping the hazy abnormalities in favor of upfront vocals, feeling more mellow and melodically straightforward. But of course if you enjoy the weirdness, then this entire album could be your boon, just waiting to be discovered.
