White Fence - Family Perfume Vol 1 and 2

White Fence is nothing if not prolific. Completely aside from the excellent collaborative album he put out with Ty Segall just a month or so ago, White Fence has flown solo on not one but two occasions this year – putting out Family Perfume Vol. 1 and Family Perfume Vol. 2 in quick succession, each instalment straddling the garage rock triumph which was Hair. With the release of the second volume comes this release of both instalments smelted together -  a twenty nine track, near-ninety minute marathon of White Fence's psychedelic sixties throwbacks, put together on a trusty old four track.

If the phrase 'psychedelic sixties throwbacks, put together on trusty old four track' really tickles your burger kitchen, then you might go in for this big time, it being a perfect showcase of what White Fence not only does best, but just does full stop. But for the more casual listener, especially the listener solely enticed by Hair, it might be found that Family Perfume Vol. 1 and 2 sadly evidences that age old quality-over-quantity maxim.

To give Family Perfume its due, it's a gorgeous sound, really nicely rendered. Taking a much more lazy, stripped back approach in comparison to his work on Hair, White Fence – even working within the parameters of four track – crafts a shimmering production, peeling back the bombast in order to allow for a lot of space within the mix; woozy guitar work speaking to wandering bass lines and shuffling drum patterns; everything managing to be high in the mix and audible without overcrowding the sound in any fashion. (That's not to say that jams like 'Down PNX' don't go all fuzzy on you; really compressed mixing and franticly competing textures being a much closer cousin to the Hair material in an invigorating sort of way). And even using these modest means, White Fence finds plenty of room for innovation; the pitch bending vocals of 'Do You Know Ida Know' on Volume 1, and Volume 2's general propensity for using the limitations of the four track against itself to create something new – chewed up distortion and glass ceilings creating experimental new tones and flourishes.

There is, however, a really unfortunate paradox to this mammoth Family Perfume release. It's a record which simply doesn't work as background music – twenty nine tracks of acoustic finger picking, wailing-yet-restrained electric guitar and warbling vocal lines making for something of a damp squib of a dinner party soundtrack, or indeed any sort of musical backdrop. This is music which demands the attention of headphones, and gains a lot from the nuances of production and attention to detail revealed through concentrated listening.

However, a twenty-nine track record of similar sounding half-sketched jams doesn't inspire a near-ninety minute isolated commitment either, meaning that Family Perfume ends up occupying something of a no man's land: a record which showcases White Fence's brilliant propensity for evoking the best of beloved genres and executing his work with a deft recording ability, but fails to find a context within which the record should be heard. Undoubtedly, Family Perfume is to be more harshly judged in light of the excellent Hair – a record which in many ways this album's opposite: just eight tracks long; a sharp blast of refined ideas and high intensity. Or, to put it more bluntly, an album which is sadly far superior to White Fence's unrestrained ramblings and explorations on Family Perfume.