Darker My Love – Alive As You Are 
I’ve done a few of these this year, a 15-year look back at albums that definitely didn’t get their due. With the clock turning a decade and a half on this one in August, it’s likely time for a reassessment. The record suffers from poor timing, having marked a stylistic shift for Darker My Love, sliding out of their fogged psychedelics and towards a Cosmic Americana revival that the kids just weren’t ready for yet. It’s a record that’s both behind the times and ahead of them. Up until this point Darker My Love had been riding a thicker form of neo-psychedelics, born out of post-Britpop, shoegaze, and a healthy dose of daily dip into The Telescopes. The band was siting pretty even with the Secret Machines / Silversun Pickups, dry-ice festival fodder, and doing it much better than most, I might add. No one was expecting the band to lean towards the heat waves of Cosmic Country and Americana, suturing the styles to their own heady heaviness. In 2010, it was a counterintuitive move, but one that seems rather prescient in hindsight.
The record would be the band’s last and the start of Tim Presley’s altar-ego as White Fence, stripping back the sound to its bare bones and finding solace more in Syd than Dead Boots and The Grape’s later years. Too often, Alive As You Are was dismissed as something akin to the kind of neu-folk fringe that might fall in with Blitzen Trapper or Fleet Foxes, or even at stab at Paisley Underground aesthetics. The latter might stick a little, but this record is far from the hipster fringe. Instead, the record, a tribute to Presley’s late father, digests West Coast psych and Canyon Folk and tosses it onto the tarmac of the thickly layered psych the band had been weaving previously. Like another lost classic from this time that I revisited, Citay’s Dream Get Together, the album seems to predict a shift towards pearl-button aesthetics that would begin to really take hold in their own psych circles about a decade later. 2010 was too busy still shaking off the lo-fi grit to appreciate this properly.
Presley was already at the fault line, it just took the rest of the heads a few years to feel comfortable in their denim and dancin’ boots. It’s a shame that this didn’t latch on harder at the time, but then I guess we’d all be lost a few great White Fence albums, wouldn’t we? This one’s got some Discogs sellers shooting for the sky, but jokes on them as Dangerbird still has some copies of this one up on the site. If you missed this, grab one for the anniversary and get it lined up between Rose City Band and Weird Ears on the next turntable session.
Support the artist. Buy it HERE.