The Wink

On the cover, a bare chest and bits of bodies sketched in ragged lines of black and white. Inside, in full calor, we find Tim Presley. The dark force behind White Fence steps into the solo light with 'The Wink'. Lit up within the shades and the folding conflex of his many musical outfits are the musical sparks that make Tim Presley come alive  - but 'The Wink' lives beyond all previous incarnations found in Drinks, Hair, White Fence and Darker My Love. Working with the creative team of producer Cate Le Bon, drummer Stella Mozgawa, and engineer Samur Khouja, Tim's located the corners of a perfect square, with their creativity and truth crafting unique parts to function as songs within songs, giving the tunes double-jointed features that extend their original intentions. The Presley guitar hand has a powerful, yet quicksilver touch, with metallic brilliance always, esp. in rhythm figurations, where it wrings chords out like panic signals, highlighting 'Can You Blame,' 'Long Bow,' 'Underwater Rain,' and 'Clue' (to name a few), and a cover version of Willie 'Loco' Alexander's 'Kerouac' (nod and a wink!), where a smooth and steadfast lyric melody is supplanted by a throw of broken guitar and shards of keys. Throughout 'The Wink', Tim's tone is thin and princely, connecting the dots sideways and backwards to align and make the image emerge. 'The Wink' is produced by Cate Le Bon, who does the impregnable work of bringing a Tim Presley solo statement into focus somehow from without, by leading Tim the long away around to make a portrait of him. Cate fully embodied the producer role, picking the songs for the album from a deep pile of demos, making arrangements for the chosen songs and steadfastly suggesting that the trusted team go off the beaten path in their execution. Alert to the scribble from which Tim's songs emerge in best home-recorded intimacy, Cate's studio production teases such details out without losing any of the cerebral splatter - deconstructing and rebuilding the songs with a tight-knit crew whose shared language lifts Tim's sound from the deep blue to create a different, stranger, authentic result. The pop pusher of our teenage century has slipped from behind the Fence to claim his name. It's about Tim!