I Have to Feed Larry's Hawk

An album which altogether represents a welcome change of direction.

Easily his most accessible material, there's still a lot of uncomfortable emotional and sonic wreckage to sift through. Peeling back the layers of grime and giving listeners a chance to sift through it for themselves makes I Have to Feed Larry's Hawk feel like a debut from this already storied songwriter.

Like Syd Barrett or, more recently, Euros Childs before him, White Fence continues to make the peripheries seem oddly accessible.

I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk delivers the same meticulously crafted, 60s indebted, but still idiosyncratic psych-folk that Presley is known for. It just happens to be sandwiched between some of the most outré music he has ever put to tape.

Joy, recorded with Ty Segall and released last year, was a cocksure, psychedelia-tinged swirl of sex and limbs and thumping rhythms. I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk exhibits little of this exuberance and is in large part a more gentle work of perspective and introspection, aided by a curatorial production that treats each element of the music, electronic or acoustic, like a moving part of a clockwork diorama, Presley’s breathy vocals condensing on the glass of the bell jar as he watches them all tick and turn.

Presley is an oddball psychedelic pop artist of considerable appeal. He’s also an experimenter in digital minimalism. Larry’s Hawk eats all kinds of stuff, apparently, and you just have to keep feeding him.

Psychedelic beguilement a la Syd Barrett and Wyatt-ish pastoralism bent into eccentric shapes figure, but variety is key. [Feb 2019, p.30]

It sounds like Presley walked into a room, set up a few microphones, pressed record, and made Feed Larry's Hawk happen however he pleased. Maybe he played the tape back later, made the appropriate edits and mixes; that was it. The challenge is a success.

I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk is something of a messy enigma. Gone are the lo-fi production values and the urgency of early White Fence material, replaced instead by songs that take their time to grow but often miss the target. There are some aural delights here, but also too many instantly forgettable tracks.

Presley makes more connections than he ever drops. [Mar 2019, p.116]