White Fence, the one man project of Tim Presley (of Darker My Love fame), plays trebly psychedelic pop that sounds just as influenced by 60s bubblegum one-offs (I’m looking at you Lemon Pipers and your “Green Tambourine”) as by “serious” artists like Love and the Byrds. On his debut album for Woodsist, White Fence, Presley sounds more like a wide-eyed teenager thinking of endless metaphors for his crush’s eyes than a horny garage rocker (with a few exceptions, like “Baxter Corner” and its paranoid chorus of “Lose your number, lose your name!” and the swaggering “Destroy Everything”). Songs like “I’ll Follow You,” “Sara Snow,” and “The Gallery” (which is provided below for your consideration) sound like they’ve just been unearthed from the dusty archives of some Sunset Strip studio, remnants of a period when every band, even the “square” ones with matching suits, had to have a least one vaguely psychedelic song.

White Fence loses a little steam in its second half, but the eleven track stretch from “Mr. Adams” to “Ring Around the Square” is so effortlessly charming and inviting that it should supply you with enough goodwill to make it through the sorta half-baked experimental stuff to get the totally sweet Lennon-esque closer “Be Right Too.” Listening to White Fence, you can almost fool yourself until thinking you’re really listening to some long lost 60s band; whether that seems cool or just another example of how lame indie rock has become in 2010 is up to you, but the fact remains that White Fence is full of some pretty amazing psych pop jams.

White Fence is available on vinyl here and will be available on CD from Woodsist April 17.

For fans of:  Syd Barrett, Love, Ariel Pink

MP3 :::
White Fence – The Gallery

Let’s get this out of the way: Spirit Spine, the one man laptop project of Bloomington, Indiana’s Joseph Denny, sounds a lot like Panda Bear. From the huge drums to the deep space reverb to the campfire singalong melodies, Denny has completely absorbed the template laid down on Person Pitch. But what saves him from the “Well, why don’t I just listen to Panda Bear?” tag is the fact that he jettisons so many of Noah Lennox’s more experimental tendencies (the crying babies, the owl hooting, and such) and just focuses on writing really catchy songs. This is a dude to watch out for.

“Slept Away,” off Spirit Spine’s new album Jungle Bridges, is offered below for your consideration. Jungle Bridges is available for download on Amazon and is streaming for free on Spirit Spine’s Bandcamp site.

MP3 :::
Spirit Spine – Slept Away

As regular readers of this mediocre blog (as well as our Twitter followers) are aware, both Hansen and I are obsessed with LOST. Here’s a photo of me drinking a DHARMA beer. I mention this because the last and current seasons of LOST touch on the ideas of the Multiverse and time travel (by way of the Time Loop Theory). This relates to Steven R. Smith, a.k.a. Ulaan Khol, in two ways. The first and most pedestrian point – dudes who are into shit like time travel, theoretical physics, mysticism, and the like can groove to Ulaan Khol no sweat.

Secondly (and most importantly), Ulaan Khol’s latest, III, practices what it preaches – bouncing about time with great ease like a pandemensional cosmic ball. Sacred mystic moods and Ben Chasney-esque eastern modal tonalities fraternize with apocalyptic noise and ambient bliss blasts from the future. Both sides make a compromise by settling somewhere in ’70s lo fi freak outs a la early Can.  Ulaan Khol is timeless not in the sense that he amalgamates genres from many movements or that he fails to convey what place in time his music exists, but rather, Ulaan Khol has no time. Does that make sense? I promise I’m not stoned.

As evidenced around the 1:15 mark of “Untitled Two,” included below, Ulaan Khol is a bad dude. III is available from Soft Abuse this Tuesday, March 9, and it will dislodge your dome.

For fans of:  Six Organs of Admittance, Can, Flying Saucer Attack, Sir Richard Bishop

MP3 :::
Ulaan Khol – Untitled 2

Sheeeeeeeit, guess I know what I’m doin’ on May 13th. I saw the Growing bros open for Mogwai in 2006, so I can attest – see them! They ripped open a hole in the sky approximately six meters above the crowd’s head. It was gnarly. Wasn’t sure if it was a portal or not, but I wasn’t about to find out – kinda like the theory that the post-mortem light at the end of the tunnel is actually a trick…

04-06 Brooklyn, NY – COCO66
04-08 Winooski, VT – Monkey House
04-10 Montreal, QC – Casa del Popolo
04-11 Toronto, ON – The Garrison
04-12 London, ON – Call the Office
04-14 Detroit, MI – Contemporary Art Museum
04-15 Chicago, IL – Bottom Lounge
04-16 Madison, WI – Project Lodge
04-17 Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry
04-18 Fargo, ND – The Aquarium
04-21 Seattle, WA – The Vera Project
04-22 Vancouver, BC – Biltmore Cabaret
04-23 Olympia, WA – Northern
04-24 Portland, OR – Berbatis Pan
04-26 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill
04-28 Oakland, CA – The Parish
04-29 Santa Cruz, CA – Brookdale Lodge
05-02 Irvine, CA – UC Irvine
05-04 Tucson, AZ – Solar Culture
05-07 Austin, TX – Mohawk
05-10 New Orleans, LA – Circle Bar
05-11 Atlanta, GA – E.A.R.L.
05-12 Knoxville, TN – Pilot Light
05-13 Lexington, KY – Al’s
05-15 Pittsburgh, PA – Garfield Artworks
05-16 Huntington, WV – Pleasant 123
05-18 Baltimore, MD – Floristree
05-19 Philadelphia, PA – Kung Fu Necktie

No word on support yet, but I’m sure it shall rule as well.

MP3 :::
Growing – Hormone
Growing – Innit

No words. Have a look at these videos. Pretty sure this has got to be a prank. Surely. Surely? Well, LOL Baltimore either way, I suppose.

UPDATE: So The Daily Swarm is claiming it’s hoax, but they don’t elaborate. It’s hilarious either way, in my book.

UPDATE REDUX: Baltimore City Paper is also calling shenanigans, though they present strong evidence. I didn’t even catch this quote when I watched it, but at one point Coward says “I don’t actually have a job because I’m just a musician so the days kind of blend together.” Yeah dude – self-awareness is a dead giveaway. That’s a good style, dudes.

MP3 :::
Teeth Mountain – Keinsein

And it sounds muy bueno. Enjoy “Car.” Emily Reo is on some next level hauntological shit.

POSSIBLY RELEVANT :::
Emily Reo’s Haunted Graffiti

MP3 :::
Emily Reo – Car

Both us and No Conclusion immediately tear open emails from De Stijl Records as soon as we get ‘em, just like how Christmas used to be. And with good reason – everything around those parts are 100% solid, and this beautiful damage jammage from Jerusalem and the Starbaskets is no exception. Jerusalem grabs the crusty grit of Elevators-style garage, adds a touch of space rock expansiveness, and calibrates said sounds to match their Midwestern stomping ground. While the tones are interstellar, they, kinda like Amen Dunes, have the uncanny ability to create a bucolic, rural psychedelia that’s as dusty as it is cosmic. Mega like.

Go see about them over at De Stijl’s website.

MP3 :::
Jerusalem and the Starbaskets – Gulf of Mexico

Invasion is a band from London. If you were wondering when the genres of soul and psych metal shall meet, the time is nigh. These are the most awesome videos you will see ever. Each is packed with dense and constant awesomeness. Skulls, pentagrams, wizards, Hubble Telescope images, robes, fire, demolition derby, sacred geometry, Egyptian pharaohs, general witchcraft, and so much more. Total damage. They are on the MySpaces.

There’s a couple things you’d expect from a solo album of a member of the Black Moth Super Rainbow: vocoder, funky drum beats , and woozy analog synths. On BMSR’s The Seven Fields of Aphelion’s new album Periphery, you only get the last one. Closer in sound to Emeralds or Stellar OM Source, Periphery is full of gorgeous ambient synth music that would probably have sounded as natural in 1985 as it does in 2010. On tracks like “Sunburst Chemicals,” “Lake Feet,” and “Mountain Mary,” The Seven Fields of Aphelion plays real live piano, giving an added poignancy and emotional tug to the music.

There has always been a warped new-age bent to BMSR (they did live in a commune together) and The Seven Fields of Aphelion brings that to the forefront, creating music that’s serene and reflective, but with totally new signifiers for what’s “peaceful” and “calming.” While listening to Periphery, you could just as easily contemplate the beauty of a dead shopping mall or an 80s cop show as you could a river stream or sunny meadow.

You can buy Periphery from Graveface Records starting Feb. 16th.

MP3 :::
The Seven Fields of Aphelion – Sunburst Chemicals

The second album by husband and wife duo Windy and Carl, Depths, is a total immersion in psych-rock’s love of distortion. As waves of feedback cycle past, you hear maybe two or three notes ring out, fighting their way past the overdriven din.  Unlike My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, which countless critics and listeners got once they heard the melodies underneath, Depths isn’t about using overdriven feedback and loop pedals to transform rock music, it’s about making those things the whole show. And yet there are melodies there, or at least repetitive pleasant tones. If Windy and Carl were trying to make difficult music, they would constantly shift the structure of the music and interject dissonant notes and sounds just to keep the listener off balance; instead they find a few gorgeous notes, then rinse (in layers of feedback and echo and reverb) and repeat.

Because the group uses such simple melodies, interjecting a minor note or chord has a huge impact on the mood of the song. On “Sirens,” a reoccurring minor chord spoils a two note ascending melody line and the whole song becomes tense and scary. And yet, by the end of the song, you’ve adapted to this sound and what sounded tense before now sounds majestic. In a similar way, “Undercurrent” begins as a menacing ballad, with a reverb heavy bass line very similar to the one on Sonic Youth’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” but unlike that song, it never builds into a rocker, content to just be creepy and full of foreboding.

One of the most exciting things about Depths (and space rock in general) is that when it clicks with you (and chances are if you’re reading this site it’s going to click with you), you realize that dynamics in music can be very overrated. Why does a song that starts out slow and calm have to build in intensity? So many musical tricks appear to be utilized for the benefit of someone listening to a song for the first time, and those same tricks can begin to sound stale and unnecessary on the fourth of fifth listen. Claiming music like this “goes nowhere” is to assume that music has some sort of destination and that it will only ever sound fully realized when it gets there.

With song titles like “Aquatica” and “Undercurrent” and “Set Adrift,” Depths is clearly connected to water and thus–horrible, horrible cliche alert–it makes for perfect rainy day music. But don’t read “rainy day” as shorthand for melancholy and sad; what makes Depths such a perfect soundtrack for rainy weather is the way the sound of the rain on your window or the hood of your coat melds so naturally with the music, or the way the music mimics closeness to water without total immersion in it.

On more recent albums like Consciousness and 2008’s Songs for the Broken Hearted, Windy and Carl have begun to clean up their sound a little bit, and as much as I like the way better production has revealed the beauty of their guitar and bass work, I also miss the heavy, frayed at the edges sound of their earlier stuff. There are moments on Depths where you can hear a guitar note bend and break under the weight of distortion, and that for me so perfectly sums up the way space rock fulfills psychedelic rock’s mission of finding beauty in pushing sound to its breaking point.

MP3 :::
Windy and Carl – Set Adrift