The 60s will never die, I am sure of this since I cannot write about an indie band without mentioning this omnipresent decade. The 60s have to be the most fertile period where musicians are still finding bottomless inspiration, just listen to White Fence and I dare you not to think about the late 60s; they actually could well be a forgotten and obscure band of this golden decade with frontman Tim Presley doing his best Syd Barrett’s reincarnation or Ray Davis’ young clone.
When White Fence took the stage at the KXSC fest, the crowd, mostly composed of University of Southern California students, had suddenly got denser and was getting closer to the stage. If people had gently stayed a little distant, drinking and eating on the lawn, they were now standing and ready to rock out.
White Fence’s sound is definitely anchored in this late 60s early 70s, often growing a sort of psychedelia in its backyard, with some songs faster than others, but always delivering bright-high-pitch guitar lines raising from the cacophonous fuzz. Like it is the case for many bands I have seen recently, the result live is quite different from the sound on the album. On record, they sound quite contained, all wide-eyed-flower-in-the-hair, whereas live, the four of them were unleashing this furious sound, this tempest of layered guitars often leaning toward psych-pop territory. It did not take long for them to trigger a large mosh pit in the crowd and even some crowd surfing, which I kind of expected looking how people were into the music.
Tim Presley is certainly a busy guy, he is also a member of Darker My Love and the Strange Boys (something which makes total sense when you listen to both bands in a row), and he had this almost monotonous and à-la-Dylan, nasal delivery, something to add to the nostalgia theme they were already cultivating heavily. Although there was no set list in view, I can guess they played songs from their 2011 ‘Is Growing Faith’, and 2010 self-titled albums.
Someone in the crowd threw a girl shoe on stage, and even if they did not pay too much attention to it at first, Presley kicked it toward the end of the set, saying with humor, ‘some people get panties, I get a shoe,… someone wants the shoe?’
Their stormy retro-psych-pop with a touch of surf rock was sure having its total effect on people around me, none of them being old enough to have been alive during the 60s or even the 70s, but having no problem at all at starting this trance dance during White Fence’s long psychedelic and trippy jams, may be as their parents did it decades ago