Ty Segall - Little Caesar

Laguna Beach smelled of ready-made dreams and hairspray.
It might not have been the planet Texlahoma described by Douglas Coupland, but the one frozen on the calendars was the same eternal June of 1974. Every evening the school dance handed out flashes of glory to some homecoming queen, while one last carefree night played out along the streets and splendor wrapped itself around the beaches, led by the hand of the tide. White and yellow surfboards, little crests of foam, a cobblestone path of seashells over the welcoming golden quilt of sand. Laguna Beach was the set of American Graffiti tangled up with that of Big Wednesday, and so 1962 had to stand just as still too, with its hot rods, its unforgettable songs and that well-timed nostalgia dispensed by generous hands to give the plot even more substance. Or else it was 1967 of the hippie epic, with its proverbial endless summer. Either way, the quintessence of this diorama remains summer itself, with its fine burden of death, as that singer put it in his world-weary maudit pose. What would eventually upend this game of infinite reruns, in fairly recent times, was an MTV-produced reality show, "Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County," which managed to forever distort every perspective and flood the Californian town with tourists and property speculators.

Laguna Beach thus became, once again, the perfect cliché to flee from. Ty Segall would never have admitted it, but he was only running away to slip into another cramped, conventional formula: the guitar-ulcer kind. He started by letting his hair fall over his shoulders and packing his suitcase with the ugliest plaid shirts since the days of Seattle's heyday. With San Francisco not too forbidding a distance away, an unassailable pretext would travel safely with him inside his Fender Jaguar case. During his apprenticeship he'd take on even leading roles, but within the most marginal outfits of the Bay Area's scrappy garage circuit, getting intensive practice through punk romps, rockabilly break-ins, lo-fi swagger and pop digressions that, at least on the surface, seemed to carry no particular ambitions. The best thing about the Epsilons and Party Fowl interludes would be the ellipsis joining the three dots within them: a Segall who was maybe still clumsy but already ravenous, and his time-wasting partners-in-crime Charles Moothart and Mikal Cronin, dragged into his getaway van along with a set of pots passed off as a drum kit and a bass held together with spit and packing tape.

All this happened about ten years ago, give or take, not long before the kid rose in record time to the rank of golden boy for a music scene that, looking closely, wasn't even really a scene. For critics, unsettled by the premature loss of a potential legend like Jay Reatard, he could only embody the ideal replacement, caught up in the rush to pair the two of them — a comparison our man would later say he was flattered by, but far from convinced of. To be fair, the points of contact are there, and not just a few. A certain physical likeness, for starters, between the long, messy blond hair and that chubby-cheeked look, like a cherub grown up and loaned out to the alternative rock circus. Then an exuberant personality, prone to clowning around, an irreverence not dictated by shrewd self-interest and expressed above all in riveting live shows, performances with such pyrotechnic flair that they did more to cement his legend than the studio records ever could. But also an undeniable talent for songwriting, matched by a quite remarkable prolificacy, beginnings in ramshackle bands, a breakthrough as a one-man band, an increasingly acclaimed solo career, time served between Goner and In The Red before landing on an independent but thoroughly prestigious label. And then that restlessness with any settled mode of expression, the need to never stand still and to compulsively explore musical territories that might be connected but were always different — from flea-bitten lo-fi garage to reimagined proto-punk, from hard rock caricature to glam, from psychedelia to power-pop, not to mention surf and bubblegum — endlessly chewing over the past and spitting it back out in a guise that, unlike so many other colleagues' admirable photocopies, still felt genuinely original.

Looking back, today we'd tell the story of this merry band of Californian twenty-somethings by sticking to the cheap little cassettes and the uncontaminated purity of their early days — if it weren't for the fact that one of their shows was attended by the negus of that scene, John Dwyer, evidently in a generous mood, with his label's contracts tucked in his jacket pocket. The Epsilons, after all, were younger siblings of his own Coachwhips, and the bond between him and that fresh-faced ringleader could only end up a mere formality. The devil of the eponymous album, released on Castle Face a few months later, was never going to be as ugly as people have had fun making it out to be. With Melted and Reverse Shark Attack he even learned how to put a lid on things, pulling out of his hat that blissfully slapdash, irresistible fuzz-pop paradigm — revivalist, yet already assembled in the studio with proper craft. The noisy tangles slapped onto the songs like heavy papier-mâché masks didn't stop the songwriting from growing gradually clearer, even if that meant laying his cards on the table and openly confessing an embarrassing debt of gratitude to the most daring side of Lennon. Landing on Drag City thus took on the shape of a reward that came quickly, but was essentially deserved.

To make good on it, Ty stitched on the jersey of the extraordinary Tour. First he collided creatively with the L.A. hipster hiding behind the moniker White Fence, then together with his band he disowned his own sturdiest clichés, forcefully shifting the needle back to the seventies, before closing out a fiery trilogy with the proverbial aurea medietas of Horatian memory. From the floral retro atmospheres and psychedelic jangle of Hair to the prog-glam-space-hard-psych-rock Leviathan of Slaughterhouse to the softening expressive recoil of Twins — all within the five-odd months of his finest year.
Then came the decline proper, because not even the most skilled surfer gets to take up permanent residence on the crest of the wave…

A fine prospect

Ty Garrett Segall is practically a nobody when he leaves his hometown to seek his fortune in San Francisco. He's a kid barely past eighteen, the adopted son of a well-off couple — a lawyer and an artist — who spends his time surfing, playing the Fender Stratocaster his grandmother gave him, and drumming for a while in his high school's dance-punk band. The Laguna Beach he grew up in starts feeling too small for him, while he viscerally despises the one portrayed in the tacky MTV reality-show sideshow of the same name, a bit of bait-and-switch that began flooding the streets of his adolescence with unbearable waves of tourists. The move to the city of the Golden Gate thus springs from an urgent need to breathe different air, and it comes true in 2005, officially to attend the local public university (where, incidentally, he will later graduate in Media Studies). It doesn't take him long, though, to start up new musical outfits, backed by a couple of old friends or by some fellow traveler he's recently run into.

Shared out between a frontman-and-lead-guitarist role alongside Charles Moothart on bass and Mikal Cronin on sax, plus keyboardist Michael Anderson and drummer Roland Cosio, the Epsilons adventure is set up in 2006 by a Ty not even twenty yet, following a vein of garage-punk that's nothing short of convulsive, razor-sharp and generously prone to drawing blood. An enjoyable, pummeling, consistently blazing eponymous debut, a decent feast of reverb for the quintet, put together moreover with an awareness that the then-green Californian still won't manage to show on his first solo records. It's recorded by Mike McHugh, who hosts the band at his Costa Mesa studio, The Distillery, and secures them a deal with Retard Disco. While the contribution of his bandmates is plain to see, what really makes the difference is the impressive verve of the very young ringleader, with a voice that from the very start reveals telling parallels with Jack White's ("Red Hat," "I Don't Know"). Frenzy, madness and meanness, all kept at a consistently worthy level, bolster the credentials of a band that, foaming at the mouth, finds its peak in the frontal assault of "Fever To Kill."

The tart noise-hardcore drift of "Gonna Give It To Me," with its fine thicket of cutting guitars, makes for a notable change of pace, bringing to mind more than once the disheveled early, four-piece Blonde Redhead. In "Snap Crackle Pop!" the electric organ instead ushers in one of those lethal rampages, somewhere between skate-punk and acidic noise-rock filth, also showing a certain range of approaches in the band's arsenal. While Segall still inevitably comes across as hemmed in by this or that cliché, the energy unleashed along the way is nonetheless impossible to ignore, helped along by a rhythm section that runs at full throttle right beside him. Some tracks — the pint-sized fury of "The Prettiest Thing," the chant-like "Pantyhose" — sound positively scorching, flash-paper lashes perfectly in line with the genre's dictates.

Epsilons is, in short, a genuinely promising first recorded step for the Laguna Beach rocker, an experience that still convinces even when the band chooses to ease off the gas pedal a little (without, mind you, ever really going soft). Impact and staying power stay devastating right to the end, and the ideas remain crystal clear. The five of them thus put together a truly killer debut, lethal in its sonic density and fervor even when it allows itself the occasional detour off the beaten path (through psychobilly, cowpunk, and a fiercely visionary eponymous closer).
The sophomore effort that follows just a few months later, Killed 'em Deader 'n A Six Card Poker Hand (Retard Disco, 2007), doesn't betray the formula, and ups the dose, pushing even harder on the pedal of madness and abrasiveness, a fierce revival of Nineties garage-punk, hard as granite and with forays into the deranged, heavily indebted to sacred monsters of that decade's Californian scene, Mummies first and foremost — a record that, in hindsight, can lay claim to immense knock-on effects on a new generation of bands in that same context, from Fidlar to Audacity. A track like "Problems," after all, says it loud and clear: this band is a steamroller.

The songs are just a touch longer and more elaborate, which means they reach (and sometimes exceed) the two-minute mark, while the swirling, mangy guitars find more room at the expense of an even more unruly, frenzied Ty in his canine vocal performance. Helping vary the diet somewhat is also a precious Farfisa organ, a megaphone for alienation on a thoroughly rotten "Stronger Than Dirt," even more locked-in than the early, independent Offspring, as well as on the no less hallucinated (and loopy) "Seaview Wislon? Yield!" The sound has grown murkier and more slanted, less superficially rough. Perfect for armoring a war machine like this one, which now even looks toward rock as heavy as Cheater Slicks or Drive Like Jehu. In the schizoid outburst of "(You're A) Liar," Segall is almost inaudible, lost in an autistic game of hide-and-seek that heightens his anarchic streak but silences all his more whimsical ambitions, here still necessarily unexpressed.
The album, in any case, is good, furious and bloodied just enough, and when Ty lets his voice ring out ("Sunshine," for instance) it's genuinely striking. Barely twenty-five minutes long, but you reach the end out of breath.

Surly, dull-witted, pissed-off. That's how the Epsilons sound at the premature dusk of their brief recording career, a joyous, devastating army of five twenty-somethings, brutal in their pummeling, obsessive sorties ("9 to 5," "My Momma Said"), and also a self-contained chapter in the Segall story, one that therefore has no need of sequels that would, in all likelihood, have dulled its virulence (the single "Teeny Boppers" is telling in this regard). With that chapter essentially closed, a stroke of luck comes Ty's way one evening when his bandmates can't make it to an already scheduled gig. Thanks to a stroke of brilliant intuition, the young man reinvents himself as a one-man band, not limiting his show to just voice and guitar but also playing the bass drum with his feet, in the manner of Mark Sultan or Bob Log III. The turning point comes down to a few practical adjustments, seeing as courage is in no short supply.

His first release under his own name is the Horn The Unicorn cassette, recorded with Kyle Crawford and put out in 2007 by Wizard Mountain, which a few months later would also release the debut of his new band, The Traditional Fools, as well as a split single with fellow locals Superstitions, "Halfnonagan" (whose three tracks would end up in 2009 on the expanded reissue of Horn The Unicorn itself). From the same period come his first EPs too, one of which, "Skin", came out on a small label from Teramo, Goodbye Boozy, which would later also handle the debut single of the Segall-Cronin duo ("Pop Song", 2009).

Ty's solo debut is full of pleasantly amateurish junk: a dirt-cheap package, a homemade feel, a slacker temperament and a raucous, loose intonation. The approach is still oriented towards a fairly textbook garage revival, didactic in its songwriting and not that brutal in its delivery, though here and there, especially on the vocal front, he already shows a bit of a budding primitivist streak. His is a rather orderly, lively power-pop (farfisa included), occasionally set alight or thrown to the most atrocious noise. It's a fun, trotting-along record even without real flashes of brilliance, with just a few pleasant sparks ("The Drag", later revisited and improved on the eponymous album). The kid still seems too controlled, though, never going overboard into show-off virtuosity or acid distortions, and his performance always fades a bit too soon, limited by a rhythmic steadiness that rules out any jolts, discontinuities or wrinkles from the start. So in the long run it gets a little boring too, the white Stratocaster relentlessly sounds muzzled or pushed into the background, while the twenty-year-old Segall still seems torn between Sonics-style clichés and toothless rip-offs of the White Stripes ("So Alone").

Slightly more interesting is the ragged sketch-work of other tracks like "You're Not Me", a poor man's Kurt Cobain above all. Rounding out the picture is a miserable (and hyper-sped-up) cover of "Bike" by Pink Floyd, plus the hazy, deviant psych-folk vignette "I Got Stoned", worthy of the flightiest Thee Oh Sees. Slightly more interesting are certain additions on the reissue, such as a nicely alienated "Skin", a sinister "Booksmart" (though no less shoddy on a technical level), the twilit and deeply sick "Love You" or the especially unruly "Ms. White", which still don't quite shake off the impression of somewhat sterile exercises.
At this embryonic stage of his career, Ty's electric guitar really sticks to the bare minimum: obsessive, recurring lines, hardly remarkable for their muscle, riffs that are elementary to say the least, flanked by a yowling, thoroughly ungainly vocal and topped off by a bass/drums pairing that's among the flattest and least appealing around (the catatonic, Eighties-style punk of "The Happy Farmer").
At the end of the day, Horn The Unicorn is little more than a goof-around stretched out maybe a touch too long.

Meanwhile, Ty wastes no time. He already has a new project up and running to keep himself busy, The Traditional Fools, shared with bassist Andrew Luttrell and David Fox, who serves the gang as drummer and second guitarist. True to personal tradition, this new creature doesn't take long to reach its debut either, since an eponymous record comes out again on Wizard Mountain (and again with Kyle Crawford as co-producer) in early 2008.

On The Traditional Fools, the expressive direction settles into a lurching garage-revival norm, at times atrocious, at times more serenely sloppy and leaning towards blues ("Layback!!!") or power-pop ("Party At My House", adrenaline-fuelled and schizoid). The sound is sturdy, over-saturated, battered by all-out noise. Once again it's an abrasive, stinging, lethal blend that's great fun, with guitars in a terminal state – Ty's is a white electric line that invades every space, making Andrew's bass almost the only recognisable element – bestial screams and a technical carelessness turned into a creed.
The tribute to Billy Childish on the opening "Davey Crocket" carries programmatic weight. Stylistically, with this filthy, ultra-reverbed, low-(or no-)fidelity garage sound, we're not that far from the junk he put out under his own name just a few months earlier. There's no shortage of good ideas and good vibes, despite a rather limited range of solutions, and the album sounds nicely rotten, charged, brutal. The mood is festive, Dionysian, vital and raucous right up to the concluding apotheosis of "All-Right", and you forgive the lopsidedness caused by such an all-consuming formal device, thanks to a purity no one would dream of holding against such young performers.

The impact remains searing, the delivery raucous, and the whole ramshackle sideshow can't help but stop at the sheer brutality of its surface, a pockmarked, off-putting skin. Still, the firepower is pretty considerable, an impressively dense sonic mess for a trio of mere twenty-somethings. Once again several tracks are just filthy one-minute punk blazes and gone, like "Kill Someone You Hate" (a Redd Kross cover), the fiercest of the lot, or "Shredstick". If at this stage his main project is the, admittedly dying, Epsilons, in a side vent like this one, just as in his solo work, Ty lets loose his craving for disorder and the wildest racket, to undeniably good effect. Rather curiously, it's precisely this latter line that will end up being developed going forward. 1998... sorry, 2008 is also, however, the year of the birth (and demise) of yet another outfit from the Laguna Beach rocker, this time on drums only: these are the less fortunate Party Fowl, featuring his trusty cohorts Cosio, Cronin and Luttrell, plus guitarist Seth Densham, with Adam Palmer on vocals. Another band oriented towards extremely low-fidelity garage-punk, though it would only yield a cassette for Dementoid and a less lo-fi EP for Post Present Medium, both eponymous and frankly negligible.

A Little Devil in San Francisco

Worthwhile or not, none of the records the hardworking Californian artist has made up to this point manage to offer him the longed-for escape from anonymity. Luck, however, is already in motion for him, and the turning point comes when one of the Epsilons' last hometown shows is attended by John Dwyer, already the frontman of a host of ferocious local outfits as well as a key figure on the Bay Area underground circuit. The two hit it off immediately, and it takes no more than a few beers downed together at the bar for it to turn into a proper friendship. Dwyer doesn't hesitate to offer Ty the chance of a launch with the label he's just founded, so a second solo debut from Segall soon sees the light of day with far more fitting visibility, catalogue number two for Castle Face after Thee Oh Sees' "Sucks Blood".
Later on, the young Californian would never miss a chance to sing the praises of his improvised patron, repeatedly describing him in this or that interview as "the mayor of San Francisco" and "the most exquisite person in the world".

Recorded by Ty with Brian Kruger, Ty Segall hits stores at the end of 2008. It opens with "Go Home", a low-fidelity postcard turned rancid, sharp and full of rough edges, a poisoned boogie over an atrocious sonic backdrop. But this expressive line is set for countless repeats, if anything leaning even further into a thoroughly rotten, deranged garage-rock drowned in reverb. His sketches are bare-bones, reduced to bones, nerves and live wire, yet the formula proves intriguing enough and wins you over without needing any great further attention to detail.
Minimal, abrasive and wild, Segall apes the earliest rock'n'roll like a shrewd primitivist, but also reveals a prodigious talent for melody and can be lofty, keen-edged, prone to a romanticism relentlessly corrupted by noise. When he wants to, he's also a pretty decent war machine with his lethal blend, a sort of tetanus priest with a soft spot for rough, anthemic sketches.

The overexposed grain saturates every blank space, while Ty fiddles about with his sing-song melodies and lets a twangy guitar ooze out with remarkable revivalist credentials. It's a new sound, irreverent, but far less slapdash than it might want to let on. Fierce yet unflappable, the young Californian apostle cunningly shuffles together surf, punk and power-pop, pushing every verse or chorus into acid-tinged exaggeration and, essentially, hitting the mark. On "You're Not Me" the tone is playful, high-spirited, prone to delightfully childish detours, much like his kindred spirit Dwyer. So the result ends up sounding like a lurching distortion of the grunge gospel, a soundtrack for the slightly unhinged, seemingly ragged but ultimately irresistible in its most grotesque flourishes, with the exasperated Fab Four of the little gem "Dating" leading the charge.
The early Segall is still an endearingly naive artist, abrasive yet gentle, with more than one point of contact with other little stars of a scene (more ideal than actual) that looks devotedly to the past, the ravenous Shannon & The Clams above all (the Ramones cover "You Should Never Have Opened That Door").

Ty Segall thus comes across as a small record with small, dazzling gems – the close of "An Ill Jest", for instance, where greater intelligibility is favoured without fully giving up the oblique intonation, the true jewel in the crown of a formula not yet defused into an overused cliché – and also a fresh work, one that helps launch a performer who's as derivative as you like but thoroughly irrepressible in his exercises as a headlong alchemist, even when his blues rip-offs force him to pay a steep debt to the early-career Jack White.
The friendship with Dwyer, for its part, would lead to a double split single with Thee Oh Sees, in 2009 ("The Drag/Maria Stacks") and 2010 ("Bruise Cruise Vol. 1"), followed by a double appearance on Castle Face's juicy compilations: 2011's "Group Flex" (which features a couple of tracks credited to Ty and Mikal, "Fame" and a cover of Bowie's "Suffragette City") and "Group Flex II: Son Of Flex" (which includes "Fucked Up Motherfucker").

2009 sees Ty serving for a few months in the ranks of Sic Alps, on drums, but it's also the year he launches an off-the-cuff, uncompromisingly lo-fi project, The Perverts, again shared with Charles Moothart and with Jigmae Baer of Royal Baths, who would also briefly join Thee Oh Sees. A six-track eponymous EP put out by Captcha is the band's only release. The first Segall record of a particularly intense year, though, is the split Ty Segall/Black Time, out in June courtesy of Canada's Telephone Explosion (later reissued three years on by Burger) under the mile-long official title "Swag / Sitting In The Back Of A Morris Marina Parked At The Pier Eating Sandwiches Whilst The Rain Drums On The Roof".

The pounding "Schwag" works as a good introduction to the new direction, but it's the near-identically-titled "Swag", the key track on this collection, that repeats the solo-debut formula with an extra gear, a pop-flavoured burst of speed that proves pretty irresistible, winks at surf and sets itself up as the manifesto of an aesthetic, of what Ty would do from here on. For the first time one of his records orchestrates a skilful compromise between ultra-reverbed fury and a catchier, lightened-up pop sensibility, in vignettes still thrown together with very little but emblematic enough of a shift in expressive gear.
Standing out are the mock-primitivism of the eloquently-titled "Be A Caveman", or the raw, skinned romanticism of a particularly tight "Goin' Down". The ramshackle "No No" reaffirms the inescapable rejection of good form, though in its rough-and-ready approach the sound has by now reached a kind of self-contained, perfectly self-sufficient classicism, one that won't undergo substantial revisions, at least not in the short term. The only exception to this pattern is the sonic sadism of "Paid Played Out" alone.

Black Time spend their one shot on a punk-rock that's certainly no more polished and, all in all, akin to Segall's earliest work, given their uncompromising noise-making streak and blissfully high-spirited attitude. As the ferocious "Infestation" shows, theirs is a pretty devastating effort, albeit still implicitly limited by an underlying conventionality straight out of the atrocious seeds of Californian punk infection of the Eighties and Nineties, with the usual Mummies leading the pack. The English lads prove more interesting when they pair blind fury ("Glass Shatters") with at least a minimum of technical structure, coming to evoke the jubilant insanity of early grunge (Mudhoney in particular) or the rough emphasis of fellow countryman Billy Childish, before the blazing thicket of overexposed guitars on "A Radio In The Dark" takes over, with its mighty wall of sound.

Barely a month goes by before Ty already has another dispatch ready for his growing community of fans. Lemons is his first release for Eric Oblivian's label, the celebrated Goner, a clear step up in status within a (merely hypothetical) scene of which he would soon become the golden boy.

Little by little the songwriting tends to normalize, the running times grow longer, and what starts to prevail is a blend of autistic garage and noise-pop, limping and warped, with subtly playful forays into folk or blues. Of course, as "Standing At The Station" makes clear, the pull toward revivalism isn't disowned, and Ty still enjoys playing the primitivist, the backward-looking urchin, with plenty of drive but also a bit more discipline than on his previous efforts, like a John Dwyer who's just a touch less feral (amid tape echo and darting little yelps).
"Lovely One" is the classic lo-fi folk sketch, disheveled and wretched, the kind he'll offer up again from time to time albeit with less swaggering bravado (on Sleeper, for instance); here it's certainly a valid diversion to break up the record's monochrome drift.
Right on its heels, "Can't Talk" immediately brings back the flat, marbled verve of a low fidelity that no longer bothers hiding its melodic instincts, choosing instead to sound awful purely for the thrill of terrorist mockery. The playground for this tireless, open-ended recreation is well represented here by the instrumental diversion of "Untitled #2", somewhere between electric minimalism and noise-rock restlessness.

Backed on the technical side by Matthew Hartman and a returning Mike McHugh, he takes a bit more of a risk with the crooked romanticism of "Rusted Dust", still chasing the ghost of Cobain, yet, in the name of an endearing marginality (perhaps precisely because of it), convincing enough. Much livelier are the one crazy exception, "Johnny" — more than anything a little treat for his rowdiest early fans — and "Die Tonight", where yesterday's schizoid fury is by now little more than a memory, with the Californian insisting on playing it almost dainty with a limited repertoire of low-difficulty tricks, just enough to earn the album a comfortable pass without any great leaps forward. The dropout boogie evoked in the song of the same name — a clever rereading of Captain Beefheart — is yet another entry in this lottery of controlled madness, run on autopilot. "Like You" closes things out without fanfare, but rightly keeps championing the disheveled, threadbare poetry of a young artist of reverb, of songs gone rancid.
Lemons is, in short, pleasant enough, even if the material here isn't exactly the most explosive, and what sticks is the impression of a consolidating work, of a kind of watered-down Garibaldian aesthetic in particular.

A hugely rewarding 2009 for the Laguna Beach garage-rocker wraps up in December with the release on Kill Shaman of Reverse Shark Attack. Preceded six months earlier by the sparkling single "Pop Song", this first album made with his friend Mikal Cronin outside of the Epsilons and Party Fowl can sound like an extremist work in hindsight, and in part it is. Loutish punk, grotesque distortions, jagged acid edges, a lush fluttering nature, and a battle-ready naïveté. On the strictly noise-making front, the savage Ty of his earliest home recordings or of the Traditional Fools had actually done worse, and even in terms of low fidelity, the previous two years' outrages aren't matched here, not even close. The stylistic direction is a lo-fi garage sound that's particularly confident in itself and its own happy pop instincts ("High School"), systematically roughed up or sped into schizoid overdrive ("Ramona") to great effect. An overloaded record that's also rotten in just the right measure, then — biting but fun — which in a sense marks a crucial turning point within their shared experience: a new starting point for Ty, while for Mikal it feels more like an off-the-cuff divertissement, never repeated in his later, more properly power-pop work, still played alongside Segall but credited to him alone.
Particularly furious and enjoyable is the cover of "Take Up Thy Stethescope And Walk" by Pink Floyd from the Barrett era, which manages the difficult feat of sounding even wilder and more deranged than the original, in the style of the most unstoppable John Dwyer. The peak, though, is inevitably reached by the title track that closes the album, claiming the entire second side for itself: a long mutant suite, an incoherent ten-plus-minute moloch that alternates flashes of flowery ballads with visionary psych drifts and triumphant Dick Dale-style surf-rock romps, all pulled off formidably.

The little Cesare you don't expect

While his live activity never lets up and keeps being hailed as an unmissable phenomenon, and not only by diehard garage fans, Ty already has a new album ready, again released on Goner, just a few months after its most immediate predecessor. That he means business with Melted is made clear by the presence of a couple of seasoned helping hands in the control room, former bandmate Mike Donovan and Eric "King Riff" Bauer, who would go on to become his most constant technical collaborator. Drummer Emily Rose Epstein begins carving out a sizable role in his backing band, but there are also notable guest spots from Donovan himself, fellow Sic Alps member Tim Hellman, John Dwyer on flute, and occasional drummers Moothart and Jigmae Baer.

The Ty on display here already feels like a new artist. The sound has largely been cleaned up while opening up a sense of depth at the same time, the songwriting shows far more deliberation, the guitar work now leans authoritatively toward the piercing, and the vocal tone sounds superbly tangy, honeyed, venomous. Sure, "Caesar" proves the streak stays essentially playful and rowdy, loose and lightweight, but now some real debts to the Fab Four start making themselves felt, and the shift in gear comes off formidably, between a drunken piano, a verdigris flute and a wicked falsetto — also because his garage roots and his weakness for feedback certainly haven't been scrapped overnight. And indeed, here he comes charging again, in a "Girlfriend" that's sharp and just abrasive enough with its sturdy fuzz armor and a subtle (but mischievous) crust of despair. This time around, though, it's the sickly ballads that dominate, suddenly curdling like Lennon-esque mayonnaise (the telling little gem "Sad Fuzz" being a case in point): behind the noise there's real structure, and under the husks and the electrical tangles there's always a killer melody, an irresistible refrain you find yourself humming almost instantly.

The record's "paunch" deliberately dampens the brilliance of this new direction, but it does so for a good reason and only for a short break: the title track is perhaps, in memory and homage to his still-recent past, the track most defiantly caked in echo and reverb, even though on closer inspection it also serves as an evidently indispensable release valve; in the same vein, "Mike D's Coke" is little more than a scruffy nursery rhyme, a fluttering, barely-there scrawl meant to indulge his lowest sonic-saboteur instincts.
Right after, it's back to flying high. "Imaginary Person" is exactly the kind of Segall-style ditty, heavy on revivalist flair and proven roadworthiness. Add to that yet another fierce, irresistible hook, and the deal is sealed, no quarter given. The bees Ty sings about in "Bees" buzz and add color but don't really sting — much like him in this more measured, citation-friendly variant, less sterilely devoted to chaos or to the obligatory prank.

You have to wait, instead, for "My Sunshine", track number eight, to finally find yourself, as long expected but long delayed, in Nirvana territory, to great effect beneath that surface misanthropy and contagious cockiness. This is romanticism as Ty Segall understands it — a simple little game, free of any great intellectual complication, which some might even find insincere (though it isn't at all). The deviant, slightly rancid streak of the best Sixties psychedelia, from "Magical Mystery Tour" onward, combined with the tightness of a sound that can be both powerful and razor-sharp, can truly work miracles ("Mrs"). He's figured this out, and throws himself headlong into this new golden vein, shrewdly blazing a trail that many will go on to follow in his wake: dumb by narrative necessity, pretty sharp in practice. The almost ecstatic closer "Alone" rounds off one of his most important and significant albums, because it's truly a turning point. Heard through these grooves, yesterday's unruly kid reveals himself to be grown-up enough, and shows every intention of pushing his music's explorations further, without ever betraying the enthusiastic, mischievous kid who still lives inside him.

The Laguna Beach artist's gamble, in any case, pays off big time. His name is now the object of a growing cult following, in Europe as much as in the United States, and the prestigious Drag City offers him a deal that would have seemed unthinkable just a couple of years earlier. Again recorded by Eric "King Riff" Bauer, Goodbye Bread is exactly the classic right record at the right time, perfect for fueling the Segall myth and broadening his standing within a garage-rock movement that had come roaring back into the spotlight after its early-Nineties heyday.

Slowed down to an almost unimaginable degree, at least compared to a little while before, and with a production finish that's practically spotless by his standards, this is the natural landing point of a reform process set in motion by the immediately preceding records, heading toward a comfort zone built on gently frayed ballads, an overall sonic clarity and a far more disciplined delivery. "California Commercial" stirs things up a bit, even if the garage-punk extremes of the past are by now only a faint memory. The norm his music settles into is a doughy, catatonic power-pop that has decisively shed all the noisy tangles and confines its show of virtuosity to the occasional, well-placed electric solo. "You Make The Sun Fry" is one of his most formidable songs, a track for a burning dusk, enriched by one of the best hooks in his catalogue and by a lovably battered pose that fits perfectly with the record's languid spirit and placid restlessness.

The debt to Lennon reaches levels bordering on the obsessive, but the devotion to the model remains sincere, heartfelt and openly declared enough to head off from the start any accusations of plagiarism or cynical opportunism. Ty brings his own blend of whininess, indifference and unhinged energy, updating the original's poetics for the present day. The single "My Head Explodes" keeps pushing the same crafty nihilist veil, dressing a melody reminiscent of the famous one from "Sweet Dreams" in grunge moods, with a chorus in the style of Smashing Pumpkins (the "Siamese Dream" era), both fittingly dosed with acid. "The Floor" plays on the same turf, with Segall slurring his words in a vacant tone while electric and acoustic guitars tie the knot amid a happily alienated mood. Fuzz takes back the reins on "Where Your Head Goes", while he plays the almost mystical role of master of ceremonies, somewhere between unhealthy unease and occasional sunshine-pop languor. A nice contrast that helps give flavor to a strange record, venomous but undeniably infectious and gripping in its sinister charm.

Having grown considerably as a songwriter, the Californian is skilled at making a big impression with very little fuel — in the case of "I Am With You", a lean set of strictly bittersweet romantic clichés and a fine knack for shifting gears, for rippling textures and a slightly schizoid lack of continuity, topped off with a decadent, blazing George Harrison-style finale.
There's never a dull moment. "Mr Toad's Wild Road" closes things out still in the vein of a certain luminous Beatles-style pauperism, navigating it deftly thanks to those two or three tricks he's clearly got down by heart, well suited to the record's mood, to its subtly psychedelic weirdness, and deployed at just the right moment with real talent and no less remarkable nerve (on loan, one imagines, from the Bloodhound lording over the cover photo).

Goner's response, now bereft of its golden goose, doesn't take long to arrive. In November of the same year comes the compilation Singles 2007-2010, a sort of greatest hits of early Segall, rounding off a scrappy, hungry-newcomer phase, only with versions deliberately cruder and rougher than the originals. Among the guest producers, besides the usual Bauer and Fox, worth noting is also Tim Cohen, frontman of the Fresh & Onlys, one of the leading lights of the San Francisco scene.

"Where We Go" kicks off the collection in the vein of a scruffy, down-at-heel garage sound with happy pop touches, before shifting toward the surf and power-pop of "Sweets", still basic in terms of songwriting but infectious in its festive, easy-listening brutality à la Mark Sultan. As "It" then makes clear — all reverb, with a wildly chafed, charging electric guitar at the center — the recordings keep their pleasantly wretched tone, and the same hallmarks, chief among them a limping guitar sound, perpetually overexposed grain, and over-the-top delivery, are reaffirmed elsewhere too, from "Son Of Sam" (originally a Seventies track by New York punks Chain Gang) onward, revealing a stylistic consistency that commands real admiration.
If you don't have any particular prejudice against lo-fi, this compilation is well worth it: the raw punk blast of "Ms. White" recalls the Traditional Fools more than Segall's early solo work; "No No" oozes slacker verve with real personality; "Skin" marries garage-punk and psychedelia over a rotten groove, and the combination works beautifully; "Booksmart" is one of those relentless monster tracks built on cutting riffs, pounding drums and an elementary melody that lodges in your head on first listen.

Great tracks like "Cents" still cut quite a figure even in this rough, hatchet-hewn guise, sharp and wonderfully direct. Even in the thick of the chaos, Ty shows he knows exactly what he's doing, leaving no doubt about the purity of his performance, in the manner of the disheveled early John Dwyer ("Standing At The Station"), having fun and entertaining with these pocket-sized tetanus tributes. The tracklist is also genuinely impressive, pulling together all the best numbers from an early career stretch that may still be naive but is, all things considered, beyond reproach, from a "My Sunshine" as bleeding as promised to a "Caesar" that's almost composed in its infectious crowd-pleasing, and from the raw-nerve pop carcass of "Dating" to the holiday blues cadences of "So Alone".
The whole second half of the album is essential. Thrown into the mix there's also a bit of schizoid filler ("Fuzzy Cat") pushing hard on the pedal of a sinister childishness, an ectoplasmic "Maria Stacks" lifted wholesale from Thee Oh Sees, shadows and echoes included, the acoustic counterpart of "Lovely One", a little psychedelic folk gem clearly indebted to George Harrison, the hallucinated boogie of closer "I Think I Have It", the electro-trash of "Shoot You In The Head", the frazzled rockabilly charge of "Happy Creeps", or the shapeless, atrocious psychobilly of "Hey Big Mouth". Behind all these masks, Ty always manages to stay convincing and credible.
For purists of the Segall gospel, this is an unmissable anthology precisely because it comes without filters, without caution, and above all without the usual filler that he has at times let clutter his official releases.

A crazy year

Ty's 2012 opens with an unprecedented (and inspired) collaboration, teaming up with the Los Angeles standard-bearer of lo-fi sixties-revival, Tim Presley aka White Fence. Still produced by King Riff, Hair comes out again on Drag City in April. It's finally an excursion with strongly psychedelic overtones, a direction for which the Barrett-worshipping White Fence proves decisive, going well beyond the simple role of "travelling companion".
The album picks up, refines and develops a conversation Segall had already begun with Mikal Cronin three years earlier on Reverse Shark Attack, especially in the torrential, shape-shifting collage that closed that record. Here we're instead in the territory of psych-folk with strong late-Sixties West Coast inflections, measured and sing-song, often open to the noisy (but sufficiently lofty) detours typical of our man, as the opening "Time" demonstrates.

Playful and sprightly, the meeting of the two souls produces its best results in passages that are floral yet biting, like "I Am Not A Game", a genuine little gem enhanced by an irresistible chamber-pop organ and Ty's devilish, fiendish Mustang. Fresh and at the same time geared toward an oblique revival, the joint venture works because it entertains and intrigues with just the right touch. "Easy Rider", meanwhile, fits the Segall identikit of the period perfectly, in line with Goodbye Bread and after: lethal hooks, rough without sounding messy, pleasantly sour in its cunning borrowing from the past.
For his part, Presley raises the weirdness quotient to great effect with philologically correct neo-hippie flourishes that mesh beautifully with Segall's scruffy garage-pop nervous energy. The partnership feels fluid and gives off an impression of happy creative freedom, of fruitful anarchy and childlike harmony that the jammed-out, swirling codas of several tracks only heighten.

"Crybaby" adds a dash of festive madness for the two guys (actually three in this case, since bass and piano are played by Cronin himself), who throw themselves headlong into a filthy, retro lo-fi puddle, without undermining the quality of a lovably sideline, off-the-grid operation thanks to that hysterical, recreational vibe. "(I Can't Get) Around You" offers a more elegant, retro-leaning arrangement by contrast, thanks to electrified harpsichord and superb guitars, but – between its blown-out, luminous grain and its ever-combative naive spirit – it sounds no less acidic or unruly than the rest of the collection.
Drowned in reverb or exacerbated emphatically by our man's temperamental Fender, the trotting jangle-pop of "Scissor People" is upended by a display of omnivorous guitar work, venomous yet muscular, a long bout of noodling or an exultant digression that still works as a free-form exercise in style. With its fine sunshine-pop backing vocals (featuring Tim's brother Sean as a guest), "Tongues" stands instead, above all, as an affectionate tribute to rebellious California in the golden years of youth protest movements – the long-haired kids of the famous musical of the same name (not by chance the title of this album too) – where guitar and bass really do entwine like tongues in a passionate exchange of amorous feeling.

If Hair hit the bullseye, the impression left by the following record is that of the classic arrow splitting the arrow already stuck in the red ring. Slaughterhouse, as it's titled, hits stores via In The Red at the end of June of the same year and is credited to the Ty Segall Band, the established four-piece (with Ty and Moothart on guitar, Mikal on bass and Epstein on drums) that had already made its recorded debut in January of the previous year with the devastating live album Live In Aisle 5, released on Southpaw and capped off with a tremendous cover of "Baby Baby Baby" by the Vibrators. It's almost a fitting tribute to the long road the quartet had travelled together on their rise to success within the indie scene. The recipe for the record, according to its author? Evil space rock. "Silver Machine" by Hawkwind meeting "N.I.B." by Black Sabbath, meeting "Master Of The Universe", again by Hawkwind (plus Stooges, MC5 and Black Flag, one might add).
Recorded in Sacramento by the right man for the job, Chris Woodhouse – the same man who turned Thee Oh Sees into the formidable war machine we know – the album also represents an important stylistic starting point for the future Fuzz project, whose records would however turn out to be far more lumbering.

"Death" throws open the pitch-black maelstrom of this shapeless moloch, crowded with heavy gullies, granite walls and venomous howls, exacerbated by a torrential hard-psych-rock emphasis straight out of the Seventies, while "I Bought My Eyes" sublimates the formula through hyper-accelerated triumphalism. It takes only a few minutes to appreciate one of Segall's most admirable productions, saturated with acidic sounds, electric ripples and bubbling pedal effects, yet also clearer than almost anything else to be found in his catalogue.
The listener is pushed, as if by centrifugal force, into a kind of plastic vertigo, a swirling, enveloping whirlwind that a possessed Ty drives without hesitation ("The Tongue"), backed by an outsized volume of firepower, an unprecedented muscular tone and a rhythmic prowess far above the average for his solo work. A much rawer, more ferocious title track, along with the thoroughly savage "The Bag I'm In", haunted by filthy psychobilly ghosts, briefly contradict this approach and aim once again for a thoroughly scabby, lo-fi garage sound. "Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart" then makes clear that the pace won't slacken, and that the intention – behind a masterfully orchestrated frenzy, within a furious but organized chaos aimed at stunning anyone who lends an ear – is to take no prisoners.

"Wave Goodbye" reins things in a little but brings back our man's best grim, deranged mask, as he plays at dressing up as Marc Bolan and revels in his malicious poses at the head of a brutal, relentless army. Guitars worthy of a sawmill, bass turned all the way up and drums sounding like a diesel compressor: a genuine display of musical butchery, which the album's title rightly alludes to. With "Muscle Man" the Californians authoritatively lean toward a lighter, slightly deranged touch, toward surf-pop refrains, without betraying a sonic imprint that always tends toward the sour – that hallucinated aesthetic and that "extra-fast" credo (explicitly mentioned in interviews and waved like a banner) which their reworking of the Bo Diddley classic "Diddy Wah Diddy" pushes to its furthest extreme. What emerges, in short, is an angrier, meaner version of the Ty we know, if only for dramatic effect. Everything, though, even the bloodthirsty "Oh Mary", is ultimately smoothed over by the ten excruciating final minutes of the jam emblematically titled "Fuzz War", a long, grotesque, purely instrumental nightmare that reeks of total alienation, a jungle of terminally distorted pedals that flips all the preceding exuberance into a dark spiral of despair.

The joke of crediting Andrew Loog Oldham, the famous Stones producer, in the liner notes – a gag that slipped past the record label's filter – ultimately confirms that the tone remains goliardic and that the happy little flotilla still refuses to take itself too seriously. Much the same can be said, broadly speaking, of the following record, Twins, released in October to round off a memorable year, albeit in the form of a first, substantial expressive step back, and in terms of a limit that perhaps can no longer be exceeded.

With this latest effort, the word "breakthrough" should by now have earned a spot on the Wikipedia page of the kid from Laguna Beach, who has just blown out twenty-five candles on his cake. By their own standard, the new tracks – again produced by Eric Bauer, with guest appearances from Moothart on drums and Brigid Dawson on backing vocals – now come across at times as a sped-up version of the amazing hooks of Melted and Goodbye Bread, and at other times as a "kids in tow" version of that same drugged-up pop phantasmagoria that, on the recent album with the band, shamelessly vampirized Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, T. Rex and Stooges, before cruelly drowning them in a bath of white-hot feedback.
The pure, unfiltered hysteria and electric howls have given immediate confirmation of their presence, and thank the Lord for every single sin devised and for every vicious disciple who crashed the party ("Thank God For Sinners", a memorable title and track). And indeed, when it comes to debauchery, the abuse heaped on defenseless pedals remains a hard fact to dispute. The tetanus-shock clang of the guitars, though, fails to reaffirm the apotheosis of reverb and grated noise found on its predecessor, even as it still hints at a decent wreck of a live show. Ty keeps singing like a man possessed, keeps dressing up as an insolent brat, but behind the two-minutes-and-out racket, his songwriting has become more deliberate and less gratuitous, as has his skill in making the most of his reduced stock of hits available.

Killer A-side, filler B-side, a glaring drop-off as it goes along, and no shame admitted in the liner notes. The twins of the title are clearly fraternal, not identical. The overall tone is coarse-grained psychedelia, ostentatiously careless of itself yet extremely shrewd in its deliberate disregard for formal niceties. Fox in the Fuzzbox, because today's version of the kid has the deceptive gaze of a sly fox. Of course, following him through his euphoric, carefully calculated romps remains fun, if only skin-deep, especially when you stumble on meaty solos worthy of a particularly scruffy J. Mascis, on strung-out beats and those unmistakable, frayed electric guitars that by now reek of trademark. Ty's music is, as ever, always adulterated and reforged according to his sickest inclinations or his own joyfully kitsch streak. There's no other explanation for the sadistic détournement applied to the inevitable Beatles-esque flourish, or for the typical grunge insolence swallowed and regurgitated into a mash of sour pulp and irony, like certain grotesque pop songs by the old Scott Weiland, destined by who knows which god to fade into the usual, predictable singalong ("There Is No Tomorrow").

His lovable, scoundrelly weirdness comes through best in the raucous blend of sixties retro, eternal-dropout garage-blues and assorted Woodsist-style (or Burger-style, to stay on brand) sponging: altogether, a skilfully counterfeited license as a seasoned trendsetter, the art of the trivial, the pratfall and the stoner, picked up back when he was still an apprentice to the Thee Oh Sees frontman and sleeping in that beat-up van fresh off the drive from the south. His teenage dreams, Twins seems to suggest, have come true in a less contrived elsewhere, but even so every future prospect seems foreclosed. There is no tomorrow, he sings when it's time to say goodbye. What remains instead are the sharp shards of surf-rock for wrinkled hearts. What remains are the broken pieces of a Californian endless summer that has lost all trace of magic and tends instead toward a mild, acid-tinged torpor, the fluttering apathy of an old, sacred reel of film that has by now gone irreparably to ruin.

Ty the sleeper

A good ten months without any new records. For most artists that could be considered a mere trifle, a nice deep breath just to catch some air. When it comes to Ty Segall, though, it's clear the news carries the same weight as the dog-bites-man story turned on its head. The period between autumn 2012 and the following August heatwave is, for the Californian singer, a year of conflicting feelings: on one side, growing success, with the spotlight now trained – thanks to him – on a scene that, perhaps, had only ever truly existed on paper, and so the move from San Francisco to Los Angeles to unwind and devote himself more consistently to surfing; weighing like a boulder on the other side of the scale, the death of his adoptive father, with whom the young man had always shared a special bond, and the consequent severing of all contact with his mother. It's hardly surprising, then, that he devoted himself less steadily to writing new songs, and understandable that he struggled even to approach his own passions.

Nor is it surprising that Sleeper, the comeback LP, born out of a context of deep isolation, speaks explicitly of loss and solitude, reflecting this particular emotional climate on a formal level too. Anger and sadness are filtered and softened by West Coast folk straddling the late Sixties and early Seventies, as well as by the more austere strains of Bert Jansch's or Neil Young's music – worlds he had already explored and paid tribute to repeatedly over the course of his brief career, though they'd been set aside on his most recent, noisier records. Making the album thus took on the shape of a therapeutic experience, worked through with an indolent touch in a kind of almost entirely acoustic singer-songwriter breviary, not without its own strange charm.

The album's ten tracks reveal, even on a casual listen, a cohesion never found before in his earlier work. The imprint here is that of a classicist folksinger, moving at a calm but sure pace, with a sharp, pained voice and straightforward, clear, reasonably effective songwriting. These last qualities suit an artist aiming to take a few less risks than usual, though they're also more exposed to the risk of monotony. The genuine ease with which he moves, even within the narrow confines of a genre not exactly known for easy charms, nonetheless acts for Ty like a license, or a kind of autopilot – one from which he still breaks free, now and then at least, so as not to deny himself the pleasure of the occasional extra risk.
Granted, Sleeper doesn't dazzle with variety, but as the lovely, vaguely bluesy electric coda of "The Man Man" shows (a refreshing sip of water in the desert, for Segall's die-hard fans), there's always room for a small surprise around the next bend. After all, it's not without its own charge to find his guitar bent into such a subdued shape (the exemplary "The Keepers"), proof that our man is capable of striking moments even without laying it on thick or stomping away at his pedals.

Even in a stripped-down solo guise, he confirms his worth both as a songwriter and as an entertainer: it's hard to imagine the Laguna Beach garage-rocker expecting anything more than this kind of validation from an anomalous record that arrived almost by chance, essentially an unrequested license to indulge an intimist streak. Spry yet listless in his somewhat languid manner, Ty falls into predictability whenever he fails to come up with something to offset the greater ordinariness of this new expressive garb. Without formal or emotional sparks, he struggles to convey the urgency of this small deviation and ends up boring the listener. But that only happens with "Sweet C.C.", and it can fairly be filed among the venial sins. Elsewhere, it takes very little to deliver even minimal thrills, like a drummed-out guitar strum serving as essential rhythmic support for that unadorned picking and that almost boyish vocal ("Come Outside"), or the luxury of a lively refrain within tight, frugal spaces ("Crazy"), ideal for bringing back, even in this new context, shards of his oblique, slightly sour streak (the falsetto does the job nicely).

A thumbs up, then, whenever the shadow of mid-Seventies Lennon peeks through ("She Don't Care"), and it's hardly a secret that he's one of the young Californian's biggest reference points: reduced originality but a comforting result, also thanks to the viola of Kristen Dylan Edrich (of fellow townsmen Mallard), the album's only guest. Livening up the "drowsy" average of the tracks on this collection is also the crooked, elusive detour of "6th Street" which, somewhere between the raw essentiality of Beck's "One Foot In The Grave" and sudden luminous openings out of an already mythical past, significantly brings things back closer to the revivalist vignettes of his friend and former bandmate White Fence, though here the weirdness seems decidedly more contained, less galloping. Nor is there any shortage of a lo-fi diversion ("Queen Lullabye") which, beyond the convenient (and slightly worn-out) device, is remembered mostly for a tone somewhere between ecstatic and soporific that, in its fragility, isn't even unpleasant.
Closing out proceedings is the harmless but sincere country-western of the emblematic "The West", put together without parodic intent, widening right at the tail end the range of formulas on a minor (but not bad) record in Segall's catalogue, one that Drag City (who expected something rather different, but backed it anyway) promoted live in smaller-than-usual venues with a mellow band (Sean Presley on guitar, the returning Andrew Luttrell on bass and Charles Moothart on drums) assembled specifically for the occasion.

Completely unexpected, the follow-up to Sleeper actually marks an obvious return to the recent past. Released on Sea Note in October 2013, once again courtesy of the ever-present Bauer, Gemini is nothing but the complete re-presentation of Twins (with the exception of "Love Fuzz", absent for easily understandable reasons) in its embryonic acoustic-demo form. Compared to the exuberance of the feedback on the already familiar tracks, these variants inevitably pay a price here and there, even though episodes like "Thanks God For Sinners", in an electric shape only partly depowered and cleaned up from the original thicket of reverb, still come across as more than worthwhile. What we get is a stripping-down, a baring that aims at the heart of his music, shorn of its most impactful trappings and post-production makeup, to foreground the voice and the spare arrangement — but ultimately it fails to justify more than a completist's interest in what is a marginal and far from essential operation.
It does, it's true, offer an alternative view of the Californian's songwriting, but it rarely gets truly exciting, aside from an "Inside Your Heart" that aligns with the baroque psych-rock of latter-day Oh Sees (complete with piano and a surly, howling guitar) and a generic flowery softness ("The Hills", the Lennon-esque "Ghost") in the episodes that most recall his occasional travel companion White Fence. The problem is that successful tracks like the fragrant, almost domestic "Would You Be My Love" work because the already-known versions worked too, just as the occasional yawn creeps in where the source material was modest to begin with ("They Told Me Too", a malign and somewhat lifeless "Handglams").
At the end of the day, this is further proof that even on records by the reckless Ty, technical artifice isn't just an optional extra but a precious device to be relied on for improvement and vitality. After all, even the utterly pale farewell of "There Is No Tomorrow", just a stumbling voice and ukulele, says as much without appeal.

We're still in October 2013, and everything about Ty Segall has already been said. Reviewing him seems to have become the most futile of all the marginal tasks a modest critic can take on — a bit like picking up that same old plot thread on the disposable pages of the TV-guide weekly, in the beloved soap-opera column. Clearly a recap of previous episodes is in order, but for once we'll keep it as tight as possible: shattered by his father's death, American garage's great hope was unable to pick up a guitar and write music for several months; the way out of the tunnel came through the therapeutic experience of an anomalous, almost entirely acoustic solo record; but for a full recovery, the Laguna Beach rocker had to throw himself into yet another side project, Fuzz, essential for rediscovering within himself the pure joy of noise. A brand-new outfit, as it was said — but only in name, since the San Francisco-based squad is in fact the same one that was already active a while back under the name Epsilons, minus Mikal Cronin's sax and Michael Anderson's keyboards. Segall has never hidden his visceral love for Black Sabbath and especially Hawkwind, and on the self-titled Fuzz he tries to wring maximum benefit from them in terms of inspiration, to put a bit of fuel into a creative tank running dangerously low.

The record kicks off under the sign of a very dark, almost funereal fanfare, pulsing slowly before soon fading into a fairly measured gallop. It's at this point that a kind of exorcism takes place, with the fuzz (nomen omen) stepping in to exacerbate the inertia in a hard rock key, echoing the above-mentioned idols but also early Groundhogs (paid tribute on a B-side), Zeppelin, and plenty of overloaded music from forty years ago. All of it then filtered through Segall's raw, blissfully sloppy inclination, amid amplifiers purging reverb by the industrial quantity and a regard for fine form close to zero. For the occasion the three accomplices shuffle the deck, swapping instruments (Ty takes drums, drummer Roland Cosio takes bass, while trusty bassist Charlie Moothart picks up the guitar), and that should say it all about the spirit of an operation put together purely for the pleasure of making a racket together.
The clearest impression, thinking back to the excellent Slaughterhouse, is that the gang nonetheless chose not to run at full throttle (especially in terms of distortion) and reined themselves in, at least in part, in line with the tenets of a genre approached with genuine devotion. The result can still sound enticing, but it's certainly not essential — if anything, it's a wholesome return to a climate of electric recreation for the bandleader (to whom there's no point in trying to attach further meanings or values that, predictably, weren't even being sought), a divertissement that matters more to its performers than to anyone else.

The explosive vitality of the album released just a year earlier under the Ty Segall Band name finds no equally convincing sequel here. Moments of decent dynamism alternate too frequently with noticeable slowdowns, sour tortuousness and prolonged proto-metal digestions lacking the right backbone, which end up wearing the listener down. There's no shortage of episodes where Ty's stamp feels much more recognizable. Beyond a curious cannibalizing of the refrain from an old Stiltskin song, "What's In My Head?" for instance recalls more than one passage on Twins, while "Loose Sutures" promises to be as sharp and noisy as the best of the catalogue: if the former sacrifices its liveliness to a monumental yet sly sonic moloch, the latter runs aground on the shoals of a tedious jam, undermined by excessive length and self-indulgence.
Further on there's room for a filthy, almost post-hardcore rampage ("Preacher"), for a touch of controlled hysteria (the choruses of "Raise") and for the rollicking, unpredictable close of the instrumental "One" (which could be Fuzz's manifesto), but there's no doubt that, by this point, interest has already irretrievably waned. Diehard fans aside, you reach the end a bit worn out and not exactly delighted, given the far-from-gourmet stew the three Californians have served up.

With the mitigating circumstance of the leader's difficult moment, and the observation that the feedback is going back to how it used to sound (that is, how it sounded just twelve months earlier), there's nothing left to do but look forward to the next episode of the Ty Segall show. But first, a commercial break: Segall's 2013 is the year of fuzz in every sense. Death By Audio, which he's always glorified for creating his beloved Fuzz War, produces, in a very limited run, a pedal bearing his signature, the Sunshine Reverberation.

The golden boy's manipulations

From dormant to manipulator in a single move. Ty Segall is the kind of guy who's long since accustomed us to sudden swerves, even if his eel-like stylistic tricks tend to resemble pure surface convolutions more than revolutions worthy of the name. Our man recently had the chance for a significant rethink, following the major changes (his father's death, the move to a new city) already discussed, even though there wasn't much room for deeper reflection. The Sleeper chapter, perhaps his most sincere record, closed without much fallout, like a simple sabbatical. Confident he could pull off yet another joyful bluff with ease, the kid chose to don new masks, at least in appearance, and the carousel started spinning again as if nothing had happened, faster than ever.

With that crafty little organ doing the honors, Manipulator presents itself — both album and title track — wearing a handsome patina of dust, as if it were a tasty leftover from the legendary "Nuggets" compilation, forgotten by Lenny Kaye for no real reason. The secondhand revival of "The Singer", recovering the Bolan-esque stigmata after the none-too-credible renunciation of the previous two records, reinforces the backward-looking bent of this new effort, and it hardly matters if the Laguna Beach blond seems to have traded yesterday's deranged Fender explosiveness, be it Mustang or Jaguar, for the slightly ingratiating vintage correctness of a Gibson Les Paul. The sound has grown sturdier, but it doesn't rule out a frequent impression of "unfinishedness", of rough-draft, demo-like approximation. This is no longer, however, the carelessness of the early lo-fi days, nor the slacker indolence of that guitar-driven garage-rock that, in five years or so, turned his name into a shining brand. Veteran engineer Chris Woodhouse steers this eleventh chapter of the Segall saga toward more pronounced psych drifts and takes care to give the Bay Area golden boy's sonic architecture a much more solid physiognomy, somewhat as he's recently done in the service of Thee Oh Sees. And just as with John Dwyer's band, what stands out here is the myth of the one man in charge (trusty collaborators Charles Moothart, Emily Rose Epstein and Mikal Cronin limit their contributions to sporadic cameos) and a vaguely baroque folk-psych revisionist number ("Stick Around"). On the other hand, compared to his peers, the songwriting appears oversimplified, stylized and entirely built on easy, catchy automatisms.

If the songwriting has become more nimble, shrewdly dumbing itself down and creating a nice contrast with the more convoluted texture of the expressive garb, what mostly limits the record is its bloated, redundant character, the heaviness of certain all-too-predictable passages, as well as its considerable double-LP prolixity (seventeen tracks for about an hour, frankly an overreach). That said, even just on the level of surface thrills, there's no shortage of enjoyable moments. Nimble even in a pop key, amid overpowering flare-ups of nostalgia for glam and the seventies, Ty goes hunting for new converts with a happily populist, reactionary album.
Another undeniable suggestion, confirmed by the press release itself, is that Manipulator wants to sound like a sort of homage to the grunge epic and to Cobain in particular: the irresistible "It's Over" or the whirlwind tacked onto the end of "Feel" are just the most direct evidence of that. Flashes of irony ("Who's Producing You?") further lighten an entertainment package that repeatedly reaffirms this soft spot for the early Nineties, though a similarly dated feel is also suggested by the rare anguished or sinister passages (the deeply sick electric whirlpools of "The Feels" recall the Smashing Pumpkins of "Silverfuck"). Adding, somewhat provocatively (though not even that much), that the most Beatles-esque track of the bunch ("The Faker") sounds more than anything like a (good) impersonation of golden-era Oasis, it should be clear that Segall has an easy time landing an impact, but can't fully satisfy anyone who, when it comes to the Fab Four, loved him above all for Goodbye Bread.

Languid and even unctuous in his purring poses, the American makes no glaring mistakes, he's tidy, but he doesn't bleed the way he perhaps would like to. The performer Ty in fact contradicts the lyricist of "The Singer", because rather than singing louder as claimed, he overdoes the falsetto, always too muted, defused by an excess of self-discipline, well below his potential as a luxurious primitivist. With a particularly balanced and engaging string accompaniment, the track in question is nonetheless among the collection's finest, though it's matched by the implicit homage to Love ("The Clock"), which makes good use of Cronin's arrangements and fresh garlands of violas and violins. It's in these hybrid solutions, in the dynamism guaranteed by the acoustic inserts, that Manipulator proves most convincing and brings all of its creator's gifts back to light. In the purely electric moments, by contrast, there's perhaps too much control, the fuzz isn't as filthy and abrasive as it could be, and, so as not to disappoint anyone, there's an insistence on finding the right compromise between nastiness and accessibility that, in practice, remains only on paper: even where the grime and motion expected of the character do peek through ("The Crawler", for instance), it's still closer to the clunky exercises of the Fuzz project than to the hard rock pyrotechnics of the unmatchable Slaughterhouse.

In short, there are interesting ideas here, but the good ones all end up resembling one another, just like the songs. And it's inevitable that you reach the finish line a bit worn out and short of breath, as well as bored after a few good initial impressions. The pretty single "Susie Thumb", with its crowd-pleasing refrain, stands as the emblem of the whole album.
Critics have gone out on a limb calling it Segall's best work, a blanket endorsement that has the flavor of a definitive consecration (though "mainstreaming" captures the idea better). That it's an ambitious work is beyond doubt, the fourteen months of gestation are unmistakable (given Ty's track record). Yet it's hard to shake the conviction that our man, fully aware of his own talent, chose the easiest path to assert it, and that he's enjoying himself a lot less than he used to.
We could be wrong, but we remain convinced that not all of the Californian manipulator's calorie-laden donuts came out with the hole this time around.

Drag City, meanwhile, has no qualms about striking while the Ty Segall brand is hot, and just three months later serves up, for the table of anonymous completists, a new rarities anthology, $ingle$ 2. It opens with the three tracks from the "Spiders" seven-inch and the interesting "I Can't Feel It" EP, measured yet visionary, dating back to the Goodbye Bread period. While "Cherry Red" offers up a playful, ragged, scattershot garage-pop that only raises the weirdness index, "Hand Glams" is essentially a demo of the Twins track of the same title, little more than a sonic scrawl drowned in the most piercing puddle of reverb and heightened by demonic choruses; no less unhinged is "Spiders", the thoroughly sick A-side of the same single. "Children Of Paul", meanwhile, settles into an overexposed, vinegary psych-rock that's not unpleasant, though "Falling Hair" fares even better, oblique and flowery like several episodes of the similarly titled Hair, somewhere between sunshine-pop and psychedelia gone rancid. "Petting The Dog", a hugely pummeling GG Allin cover performed with a good dose of noise-rock ferocity and an outrageous amount of ravenous fuzz, takes us straight back to our man's ultra-reverbed, lo-fi beginnings, but with the added emphasis on hardcore explored especially in the related side projects.

"Music For A Film 1" comes from a split single with Chad & The Meatbodies released on Famous Class Records. It's a bizarre, instrumental-only exploration, as superfluous as it is curious, a divertissement that marries a kind of percussive tribalism to the acid inserts of an electric guitar in the process of ulcerating. From another split, the one with Feeling The Love put out by Permanent back in the banner year of 2012, comes the resurfaced "It's a Problem", a fine song with a late-Sixties West Coast flavor, jangly guitar and a fine electric outburst at the close. The rereading of "Femme Fatale", from the modest Velvet Underground tribute compilation assembled by Castle Face, is doglike, irreverent, scruffy, anarchic, mad and cheeky enough, but on closer listening not all that incisive.
Another rarity bearing the stamp of friend Dwyer's label is "Fucked Up Motherfucker", notable also for the elusive co-starring role of Mikal Cronin's revved-up saxophone, a number that's almost tipsy, foaming prog-rock. The B-sides of the already-mentioned Twins are particularly well represented here: "For Those Who Weep", for instance, with an extremely high coefficient of Beatles-esque enchantment and acoustic textures that bring it close to the demos of that same album, later gathered on Gemini; or "Mother Lemonade", another Sixties revival that wouldn't have looked out of place on side two of that record, even if it sounds a touch predictable and on autopilot, like a good deal of $ingle$ 2.

The year closes with the launch of his own label, the Drag City subsidiary God? Records, which immediately signs friends Wand. Just a few months later, Segall gives life to yet another band, this time alongside Mike Donovan of Sic Alps and Eric Park, already John Dwyer's bandmate in Yikes. This is Peacers, who debut with a split single shared with Elisa Ambrogio, followed shortly after by a (rather lackluster) eponymous album, again for Drag City, recorded by the usual Eric Bauer and with Ty taking on the entire rhythm section duties for the occasion. Among the guests is the female voice of Thee Oh Sees, Brigid Dawson.
In 2015 two live albums also come out. One looks to the past, "Live In San Francisco", an ideal farewell to the Bay Area that Castle Face puts out in January, credited to the revived Ty Segall Band; and then the one more forward-looking, co-credited to his friend Kyle Thomas (aka King Tuff), "Live At Pickaton", which Easy Sound puts out in May. Thomas himself will soon join his band on a permanent basis a few months later. A year crowded with side activities closes in October with the second installment of the Fuzz adventure (Fuzz II). In the two years since the release of the first chapter under that name, Roland Cosio has packed his bags and joined, whether permanently or not remains to be seen, Together Pangea. The bassist's spot left vacant by him has nevertheless been filled in no time by another prized standout from the same circle of collaborators, that Chad Ubovich who has meanwhile launched the Meatbodies venture with a remarkable self-titled debut. No sooner has the changing of the guard been recorded than the engine has started up again, roaring louder than ever.

As much as it keeps playing its game in the Black Sabbath/Hawkwind/Grateful Dead zone, from the very start the band sounds snappier than we remembered, its mechanisms well-oiled, its shifts of pace appreciable, the result more agile, net of the usual elephantine tendency toward psychedelic rock revisionism. With the untamed state of the best Ty Segall Band resurrected, what's particularly impressive is the trio's rhythmic firepower, while the electric roars proliferate in excellent abundance and Ty plays his part with his usual, happy commitment to the character. The muscle tone remains remarkable, even enhanced, the guitars stay swollen, and it seems healthy that every so often the mic changes hands, now to an Osbourne-esque Moothart ("Rat Race", acidic and brash enough), now to Ubovich ("Pipe", on autopilot if truth be told). Nastier and, if possible, grimier than their norm, Fuzz testify to the project's greater viciousness in this second and far more abrasive outing. Noteworthy, for instance, is "Pollinate", truly biting but with almost ecstatic moments drowned in the chaos, as is the sickly, almost feverish (if not schizoid) intonation that surfaces in "Bringer Of Light", one of the more theatrical numbers of the bunch. Not to mention how the deranged chants of "Burning Wreath" send their saccharine aura to the slaughter, forced to crash against the high waves of the granite wall.

Among the gems, "Let It Live" boasts a killer bassline and refrain, giving shape to a ground-zero hard rock that promises to drill into the listener's skull and not let go for a long time. Ty carries his blatant populism and his ingratiating little voice into these waters too, and the surrender can only be unconditional. With its dark omens, "Say Hello" instead releases faint Morrison-esque suggestions, before being plunged into a paradigmatic Segall-esque downpour. Emphatic, cruel and relentless as expected, it deserves to be counted among the record's memorable pages. On the production side, our heroes choose to forgo the oracular Chris Woodhouse and handle things themselves, though this doesn't stop them from sounding massive and purging as needed, drawing closer in the closing tracks to the most celebrated disciples of the Sacramento guru, explosive ("Sleestak") and visionary ("II") as on "Carrion Crawler / The Dream" or baroque and elusive as in more recent works, strings included ("Silent Sits The Dust Bowl").

However conscientious the policy of trimming the length of each individual track, the almost doubled number of tracks effectively negates the benefits of such slimming down, bringing the record to almost an hour and ten minutes in length and to the status of a double collection. The scruffy, utterly rotten punk of "Red Flag" gives a good sense of how the pace has meanwhile become considerably more driving, though this can only be mentioned as one of the extreme cases, at the opposite end from the more canonical and spry garage outlook of "New Flesh". Despite the greater variety, the tendency to repeat formulas is almost inevitable, in a second half that is inevitably less convincing. That this is music played out of sincere passion, however, cannot be denied. As is (almost) always the case with Ty Segall, the record proves enjoyable in its entirety while also being, at the same time, dispensable.

Masquerades, retreats and new projects

In November Goner resurfaces, assembling in Ty Rex the two eponymous EPs of Bolan-esque covers dating back to 2011 and 2013, with the addition of one unreleased track. The production is generally more polished and intelligible, so as not to upend the model, even though Segall's trademark is still recognizable in certain formal details (the decent helping of reverb, the goliardic intonation, a lo-fi quality that is never a hindrance). A collection that rightfully falls among those put together by the Californian mostly with the fan's precious delight, with passion and a certain almost devotional respect. The record flows pleasantly, interpreted with the right temperament and always played convincingly by a Ty clearly at ease even with sounds more grandiose than his usually raw and rough-hewn average. What emerges is a Segall who is necessarily over-the-top and theatrical, skilled moreover at not simply getting lost in a necrophiliac duplication of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies originals, choosing instead to adapt them to his own marbled, raspy sensibility, which remains his most recognizable trait (as well as the one most anchored to the present).

Our man dons the primitivist mask in a particularly rough-hewn "Woodland Rock", slightly altering his own nature, while he seems to have the time of his life, like a kid, on a "20th Century Boy" that fits his impish, cheeky nature to a tee (and he's perfect for the part vocally too). Elsewhere he instead comes across as more controlled and composed. That's the case on "Salamanda Palaganda" and the torrential "Elemental Child", which stay more faithful to the originals — grotesque distortions included — and constrain his moves more, while nonetheless also representing an essential outlet for his hammy ambitions as an axeman armed to the teeth with distortion pedals.
Looking ahead, Ty Rex amounts to a collection of songs that will show a not-so-marginal influence (who knows how consciously) on the long gestation of his album closest to such a source of inspiration, be it glam, hard rock or progressive, namely Manipulator. A release that is, for this reason too, quite interesting, aimed above all at reclaiming the very earliest Bolan (the Tyrannosaurus Rex era, name still spelled out in full), closing with "The Motivator", the only track lifted from the obvious "Electric Warrior", for a recreation that is essentially disciplined and never overdoes the swagger.

But the time has come for an album of new material credited to Segall alone. Co-produced by Facundo Bermudez, who had already worked with No Age, Bleached and Hunx And His Punks, the new Emotional Mugger comes out again on Drag City in January 2016. In fact, Ty can now rely on a new backing band called The Muggers that honestly smells like a supergroup: he forgoes playing guitar himself, leaving that task to Kyle Thomas aka King Tuff, Emmett Kelly aka Cairo Gang and Cory Hanson of Wand, who also plays keyboards, while the rhythm section is handed over to the ever-reliable bass of Mikal Cronin and fellow Wand member Evan Burrows on drums. This lineup isn't the only novelty, though unfortunately it will end up being the only truly interesting one. If the album's promotional strategy already seems rather shameless, dumped onto old VHS tapes of "My Life" and "Star Trek II" mailed to the Pitchfork offices — the classic example of calculated weirdness — downright laughable is the carnival act of the monstrous-child mask (Sloppo, the alias's name) worn by our man in the promo clips and on the promotional tour. And then, well, there's the music, which holds the biggest disappointments in store.

Segall reshuffles the deck with an alt-rock only lightly streaked with psychedelia but overly on-the-nose in its songwriting and minimal in its sonic imprint. From the opening "Squealer" onward, what prevails is a playful suggestion lacking any real bite, unable to give depth to his guitar explorations, while "Californian Hills" finds him playing with a certain theatrical emphasis, donning the masks of the grim, Luciferian, vaguely maudit singer, giving the impression, for once, of taking himself a bit too seriously. He soon crowds the record with expressive oddities that never quite come into focus, horsing around on his electric guitar amid illogical shifts of pace and tempests in a teacup that couldn't impress even if they tried. And that doesn't seem to be the intention here, since the guy comes across as listless even in his disorderly drifting, with no trace left of any usable aggression nor of that joyful madness of the young dropout that he once used to infect the listener. What's left is an autistic formula of chants and loose-jointed riffs, an underlying senselessness adopted as a new banner but disqualified from the start by a lack of clarity.

A bit belatedly, "Breakfast Eggs" tries to dust off old tricks learned from "Magical Mystery Tour", but rather than entertaining or amazing, it leaves a sense of measured discomfort in an audience used to far more explosiveness from him. The sound is too buried, muffled, and the performance remains deliberately cold, distant, standoffish, so even the few good ideas stay stranded in the catalogue of unexpressed potential. That this happens in particular with "Diversion" should and does sound alarming, given that we're talking about a cover of the Equals, not an original. And even so, it isn't hard to imagine it instead in a noisy, bleeding guise from a Segall on his best days, something altogether different from this syrupy, soulless mantra that smells like homework done deliberately without passion, tossing away even the luxurious cameo of Melvins drummer Dale Crover.

"Baby Big Man (I Want A Mommy)" pushes this flighty radicalism to its extreme consequences, though vintage effects and toy organs at least lend some legitimacy to that "weird" badge our man takes pains to display at every turn, compulsively. "Mandy Cream", meanwhile, seizes the chance to play the joker card of a peppy Seventies garage-blues with a sour tinge of funk, so unhinged that it's not actually unpleasant. "Squealer Two" has the merit of translating this sickly disposition into an ecstatic, even jubilant, display, and at least offers up a memorable refrain. But strangeness for strangeness' sake, drawn out with that so forced eccentric intonation, inevitably ends up showing its seams. The single "Candy Sam" overdoes the sinister vocal inflections and the acidic guitar, saturating every space without ever really attacking it, as might have been desirable. And the whole record, on close listen, is like that, pursuing the same schematism to the point of obviousness, with the sole consolation of not exposing itself to any accusation of inconsistency. The worst comes near the end with "W.U.O.T.W.S.", a delirium of unprocessed ideas, endlessly recirculating, useful only for amplifying the discomfort over the whole operation (like Lennon's worst experimental ramblings).
The farewell of "The Magazine" brings to completion that climate of dull alienation, sealing in Emotional Mugger the festival of inconclusiveness, of shamelessness, of psychotic and vainly resuscitated glam. Together, the most harebrained chapter of Segall's discography and a substantial dud.

Speaking of the dead called back to life, amid rock-bottom fidelity, all-out noise, guitars in a terminal state and systematic carelessness, in April 2016 In The Red scrapes the bottom of the small barrel of the one-off Traditional Fools project, niche glory now guaranteed for the Californian golden boy. This Fools Gold is a nice mishmash recorded almost entirely by David Fox: songs from the predecessor re-presented in a slightly more palatable and slowed-down variant ("Milkman", "Valley Of The Jams") or live (the archetypal "Party At My House"), without giving up, at least on paper, a crumb of that scruffy, proudly naive verve; four tracks from the debut EP, if anything even scuzzier and more roguish, including the gem "I Got My Baby" and the slacker rant "Surfin' With The Phantom"; a handful of rarities of the same ilk or even more obscure and frazzled ("Please", the single "Street Surfin'", instrumental and basic all told), among them reworkings ranging from Link Wray to the Damned, and from Redd Kross to Love.

A few episodes closer to psychobilly remain worthwhile, such as a sickly "Black Water", or the weirdo-punk caricature of the Ramones-style sketched out in "Do You Wanna Touch Me?" (the original is by Gary Glitter), but truly useful, for gauging the actual worth of this incarnation, is a cover of the Mummies themselves, already offered by Ty with the Epsilons in an explosive version, "Stronger Than Dirt", here inexorably watered down. The impact, in fact, isn't all that scorching: the intonation still tends toward the raucous and the whole ramshackle sideshow can't help but stop at the ferocity of its surface, at a pockmarked, off-putting skin. The firepower, however, doesn't seem as high as on the original, and yet another sorted pile of Segall's leftovers leaves things rather middling. For anyone who doesn't count among the most ferocious completists but is still curious to understand what kind of music Ty played before becoming the minor celebrity of the indie circus we know today, this cobbled-together collection should be set aside without hesitation in favor of fishing out instead the two gems by the Epsilons.

Anyone more drawn instead to today's Ty Segall, perhaps the slightly anomalous one of unforeseen digressions, might find plenty to chew on in his new creature, named Gøggs, which gets its baptism of fire again on In The Red in July 2016 with an eponymous LP. "Not a side project, but a necessity." That's how, according to the words of Ex-Cult frontman Chris Shaw, this latest — and, all things considered, unexpected — new incarnation of our man should be understood. The reasons behind a collaboration born, at least in spirit, in 2013, when the Memphis band was chosen to open several dates of the Slaughterhouse tour, are to be found in the long-standing friendship between the two singers. The embryonic idea turned into an actual band as soon as Segall spotted a whole free week in his schedule and suggested to Shaw that they record at his home studio in Los Angeles together with the usual Charles Moothart, working mainly from instrumental demos previously sent to his Tennessee colleague. The Californian then coined a name devoid of any particular meaning, granted his guest sole command of the microphone, and carved out for himself the role of guitarist and producer, splitting bass, keyboard and drum duties with his trusty Charlie, companion in a thousand adventures.

To round out the cast and make the whole thing more compelling, there could hardly be missing the usual handful of guests specially picked from today's garage star's inner circle: Cory Hanson of Wand, Together Pangea and Meatbodies (bass and synth on a thoroughly deranged title track that pleasantly reeks of Coachwhips), the ever-present Mikal Cronin (bass on the big single "Glendale Junkyard") and Ty's girlfriend, Denée Petracek of Vial, enlisted to scream on a "Final Notice" that is, to put it mildly, ragged and frenzied.
This collection asserts itself from the very first instant as a fierce, feral little record, but one that, in the end, can be recommended not just to die-hard devotees of Segall's exploits, and it got a flattering preview in the closing track, "Glendale Junkyard", between granite blows and purging impetuousness. It's a record dedicated to the city of Los Angeles, inspired by its most noxious imagery (the open-air landfills, the b-movie corrupt cops in "Needle Trade Off") or by local bands that made history, X and Germs above all. The sonic imprint, not for nothing, is blatantly hardcore-punk, and Gøggs shape up as Segall's armed wing for a personal rereading of that world and its small-scale epic.

If the approach feels credible, much of the credit goes to a Shaw who, with his frontal assaults, his schizoid streak and that tone somewhere between apathetic and vicious, proves truly perfect for the role, while the rest of the gang busies itself in the background with a decent dose of weirdo-punk mayhem. As with the Fuzz project, you can sense the scruffy, amateurish griffe of Ty and co., but the unmediated impact and the choice to always, suitably, stay one step back speaks well of a new outfit evidently put together out of pure passion, with the necessary purity, generous doses of nastiness and madness, plus a guitar finally free to run wild in untamed noise-rock filth (the blazing postcard that is "Smoke The Würm"). All things considered, it's a game in which everyone wins: Shaw, on the verge of a third chapter with the forgettable Ex-Cult, gets the songwriting of his life; Moothart finds the best possible launchpad for his new record under the moniker CFM, "Still Life Of Citrus And Slime"; while Ty, who in more conventional territory seems to have somewhat exhausted his drive and, even more so, his desire to have fun, regains his shine and healthy enthusiasm with the right kind of diversion. However off-the-cuff it may be, it's an experience that's not bad at all.

When the fateful self-titled album comes around for an artist who's no newcomer, it's natural to assume that record is born carrying an extra weight of reflection on one's own life, something the musician felt a certain urgency to set down in song. That may just be a cliché, but it's not unusual for such works to present themselves to listeners with the shape and purpose of an ideal summing-up. If the premise holds almost invariably true for singer-songwriters, it's a whole different story when applied to ironic, unruly rockers like Ty Segall. Not coincidentally, he'd already released a work bearing his own name practically at the start of his career, but here he still seems to be sending a couple of meaningful messages: first, the dusting-off of the classic lineup from the good old days, with Charlie Moothart on drums and Mikal Cronin on bass, then the surprises represented by a trio of thoroughly respectable additions — the guitar of Emmett Kelly and the piano of Ben Boye (both already associates of Bonnie Prince Billy and active in the Cairo Gang project) — plus production entrusted to none other than Steve Albini.

The calling card is a sonic wall that's nothing short of remarkable. Albini has evidently served to wipe the slate clean, allowing a return in a sense to the source, to that dirty, direct sound stripped of the many hard or prog superstructures piled on along the way. Ty's music thus goes back to being full-bodied, ground-zero rock: roaring, drenched in reverb, biting and martial, still gloriously swaggering and over-the-top — even anthemic, if we're to trust the furious opener "Break A Guitar" — but essentially purged of misleading formal fussiness. On "Freedom" the Californian goes so far as to openly claim his right to freedom, and in his case freedom corresponds exactly to the blazing authenticity of his early days, to pedals stomped with gleeful ferocity, to the pots-and-pans racket of the Epsilons, to the swagger and youthful naivety he seemed to have given up. Of course, he wouldn't quite be himself if he didn't indulge in some glaring excess, as in the ten-plus minutes of "Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)", halfway between the noisy Beatles-esque digressions of "Melted" and that inexorable monolith signed five years ago now under the name of his Band.

Guiding his moves, today as then, is an exhilarating ease along with a firepower that's still formidable, despite the many albums racked up in the meantime. So, in his wild yet thoroughly entertained rambles, Segall indulges in both placid digressions and feral frontal assaults. The now-customary assortment of oddities is, this time, reduced to a patchy gallery of sketches rather than the rather hard-to-digest expressive quirks of its predecessor. The approach of the new Ty Segall is pleasantly straightforward and aims to lay down a no-frills breviary (and, precisely for that reason, a fairly convincing one), ranging widely from the crooked power-pop of "Papers" to the more sun-kissed, very West-Coast gem "Take Care", passing through echoes of the murky, pitch-black Fuzz adventure ("The Only One"), and a compass fixed on the more roughly rock'n'roll Lennon, in a euphoric, abrasive, take-no-prisoners sonic climate. The garage-punk outburst "Thank You Mr. K", complete with broken shards, further widens the range of references without ever fully tipping into the post-territory opened, not without profit, by the latest of his projects, Gøggs, remaining instead more geared toward the thrill of the romp for its own sake than the trappings of the philologically correct, the loving genre tribute. And while "Orange Color Queen" brings back the acoustic, mildly psych crystals of Sleeper, albeit with a far more easygoing tone than the solemn, composed one of back then, "Talkin'" offers an unusual little dose of sour blues: a blurred snapshot, just like the cover, of a Ty who's frayed, worn out, even aged but as enjoyable as ever, with that vaguely crepuscular inflection and a piano that seem placed there on purpose to tell us not to take him too seriously.

No, this certainly isn't some calculated summing-up, but rather a self-portrait presumably judged to be truthful, representative, let's say. We might be wrong, but the impression is that the golden boy and his gang hadn't enjoyed themselves this much making a new album in a very long time, not since Goodbye Bread or thereabouts, and the same should hold true for the listener. The return to the eponymous title, perhaps, is explained above all by this.

And here we are in 2018. Straight away, a big surprise: the tenth, monumental album credited to Ty Segall, essentially a deepening of the conversation begun with the previous self-titled record just twelve months earlier. Back then there was the restless claim of "Freedom"; this time around, wide-ranging appeals to freedom are countless. Not just proclamations, though, crowning a truly intense year that saw Ty marry Denée Petracek of Vial and also release a couple of EPs, the mini "Fried Shallots" and, on Suicide Squeeze, the seven-inch "Sentimental Goblin". At his side, the "Freedom Band" is more than confirmed, with the trusted rhythm section of Charles Moothart and Mikal Cronin, Ben Boye's keyboards and the "challenging" guitar of the other Cairo Gang member, Emmett Kelly, joined by his wife's barks on "Meaning" and the percussion of neighbor Fred Armisen. The true wild card of Freedom's Goblin, however, is the horns, which throw open sudden soul breaches but don't shy away from occasional forays into rancid, almost no-wave jazz territory (Cronin's sax on "Talkin 3", recalling James Chance And The Contortions).

The dedication to his dachshund Fanny that opens the proceedings accentuates precisely this shift toward a less cerebral, less self-centered kind of showmanship, more that of a grand master of ceremonies: the usual seventies-style elephantiasis of his is on full display, but dished out with more genuine enthusiasm and, every now and then, stripped of the arrogance of old. Kaleidoscopic and chaotic, joyously derivative, intensely classic-rock, the record is wrapped in the purity that the otherwise celebrated Manipulator had lacked, and has the merit of harnessing the Californian's Lucullan excess and omnivorous appetite in a healthy way, keeping a steady, simmering tension going — sometimes underground — that lets the songs pulse with enough vitality even where the usual eccentric exercises in style seem to prevail: at times ragged, more often infected by a bizarre taste for contamination, they remain consistently elusive and over the top, the product of an inventiveness finally exercised with a free hand. Proof of this is the festive alienation staged — amid the crooked hysteria of the brass and a gospel choir that's equally sour — by "The Main Pretender", effectively flipping the pompous (and self-referential) rhetoric of that one illustrious double-album predecessor.

Recorded across five different studios, including one set up in his own garage in Los Angeles, again under the supervision of Steve Albini, Freedom's Goblin has been hailed in many quarters as Segall's "White Album", and indeed the Beatles-esque echoes are once again plentiful (just think of titles like "Cry Cry Cry", clearly a fragile tribute to George Harrison). In their sprawling, disorderly flow, these debts now reveal something triumphantly erratic, an uncontainable spleen prone to aberration that you'd rather expect from his friend and mentor John Dwyer ("When Mummy Kills You"). The Fab Four resurface with the aching intimacy of "Rain", which really does seem intent on dramatizing the introversion of the old Sleeper through a far sturdier framework, playing the melodic register with real character, almost as if we were in the presence of a seasoned singer-songwriter. Making this very reference explicit, the closing twelve minutes of "And, Goodnight" take on the task of closing a painful five-year parenthesis with a visionary, searing reinterpretation of that old title track.

Amid percussive offal and filthy electrics à la Prince, the disco-funk cover of Hot Chocolate's "Every 1's A Winner" pushes the exploration toward a grimy, rather galloping, Beck-ish revival, never debased into tired caricature. The Bolan-esque "My Lady's On Fire" marks a decisive return to Goodbye Bread territory, though without dwelling on that record's easy-listening perfection and instead leaning into digression, a jam rich in happy swells, knowing and charmingly decorative. With a greater leaning toward flowery prog than the hard rock swagger of his side projects, Ty rediscovers the necessary substance in numbers of absolute skill like "Alta", flowing and indulgent just enough but no longer betraying the pressure of a talented kid eternally chasing validation. Past thirty, Segall really does seem more mature and more free as an artist, less bound by expected impressions, more at ease running wild without a shadow of self-satisfaction on the very record he'd dreamed of making for who knows how long: fewer forced bits of bravado, noisy chaos disciplined just enough, more easy enchantment with no pretense of artistic infallibility. The apotheosis of this fresh perspective — imperfect, but one that still feels like a victory — is the manifesto-ballad "I'm Free", masterfully counterbalanced by an equally cathartic and soothing "5 Ft. Tall".

From glam to the inevitable garage-psych residue scattered here and there, the blond from Laguna Beach keeps clear of rigid genre constraints, flaunting instead an eclecticism and a weirdness that, in its more experimental moments, prove worthy of the bastard genius of Ween. What perhaps penalizes an album of such rare candor is simply its sheer, unwieldy size, hardly inclined toward concision, even if overall Freedom's Goblin ends up sounding more coherent than one might expect given the sheer number of ideas, often contradictory ones. Holding it all together is the ease of a performer who really does seem at peace with himself and his own capricious quirks, whose voice at times shrinks into falsetto, at times swells as if to give further breath to romps that already make explosive physicality a trademark, when he isn't instead choosing to push himself to the point of strain or rupture. What takes the stage, more than anything, is a love of expressive excess, in a winding yet reassured flow that opens up a remarkable correspondence between the man and the artist. So in its wink to the Band, the carousel of "The Last Waltz" comes across as tipsy and bittersweet, but also joyful and sharp like life itself, and Ty rediscovers in one stroke the urgency and uncontaminated spirit of his earliest steps.

The summer of 2018 proves the ideal moment to dust off the collaboration with Tim Presley, six years after Hair and when no one expected a return to be on the cards. A two-man record, genuinely written and played four-handed, to convince us once again that opposites attract. We might fall for it if we didn't know them well enough, and didn't know just how finely they've learned to calibrate their respective flair in the past. Of course, over all this time something had to change: the first — hyperactive as ever — has taken several artistic steps forward, while the second seems to have considerably thinned out his commitments, having not released a solo work under the White Fence name since 2014, though he's kept busy putting out two albums as Drinks alongside the eccentric Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, the second of which, "Hippo Lite", came out that very spring. So be it: let's set aside the many stylistic parallels between the two performers and go along with the promotional image shot by Denée Petracek, Mrs. Segall, with little dachshund Fanny and tabby cat Clifford held in their respective owners' arms.

Opened precisely by the sunshine-freak-folk flourishes you'd expect, Joy launches straight into a disorderly jumble of pop impressions. The most Beatles-esque, yet sulky and slightly bitter, incarnation of the thirty-one-year-old from Laguna Beach soon takes over, alongside the usual eclecticism and a solid electric verve, one that's ready, however, to be undercut by a series of outwardly quieter sketches which in fact keep all due restlessness lurking just beneath the surface, always a step away from erupting. Scattered throughout are a few good touches, like the spry, venomous jangle-pop of "Body Behavior", but as a whole it feels far too scattered and ragged to repeat the happy miracle of "Hair". What comes out is, inevitably, a more self-referential and uneven work, not a bad one, but one that lets White Fence's innate tendency toward the fragmentary take over: plenty of episodes, some of them curious, but frayed, like the tart "Good Boy".

Alongside what looks very much like an affectionate nod to the pair's previous collaborative release ("Do Your Hair") or a "Hey Joe, Where You Going With That?" that seems the perfect testament to the young, broke, rancid and sinister Segall (in the vein of the very earliest Beck), yet also a little bit lopsided and devoted to weirdness at all costs, here come the aimless noise interludes, little gems tossed off almost carelessly, still deep in sixties revival mode ("A Nod"), reckless lo-fi asides that lead nowhere and entertain only the musicians themselves ("A Grin Without Smile"), or swaggering bits of dim-witted garage-punk reminiscent of Party Fowl that push the junk-rock quotient past what's warranted ("Other Way"). The one long track, "She Is Gold", comes across as a rather bored, largely instrumental jam that plays the improvisation card without any success. In the closing stretch, the cute (if a bit listless) "My Friend" and the playful detour of "Tommy's Place" do nothing to redeem an unfocused, formless work like Joy, the flip side of Freedom's Goblin in showing just how excessive freedom, poorly channeled, can end up hurting Ty's otherwise honest ambitions. A record, in short, less consistently and less joyfully psychedelic than its predecessor, better suited to die-hard fans and completists than to the lukewarm, occasional admirer of either party. Dog or cat, makes no difference.

But 2018 certainly doesn't end there: also arriving are a new collaboration with the GØGGS project (Pre Strike Sweep), the document of a performance held at the Los Angeles art gallery Crying Clover (Orange Rainbow, released on cassette in just 55 copies), a covers collection, Fudge Sandwich, and the self-titled debut of a band called C.I.A., in which Ty plays alongside his wife Denee Segall and Emmett Kelly of the Cairo Gang.

On Fudge Sandwich, released October 26th, Segall shows he can brand other people's songs with his own unmistakable style, launching into unrestrained guitar solos that make even an evergreen like the Spencer Davis Group's (Stevie Winwood's) "I'm A Man" feel personal, sending the legend of the Grateful Dead into overdrive on "St. Stephen", and lending extra dignity to the kraut-prog of Amon Duul II's "Archangel Thunderbird". The most enjoyable moments come with the more driving tracks, versions that could easily have come from his own pen: the frenzied "Hit It And Quit It" by Funkadelic, rendered in blasts of fuzz, the thoroughly unhinged "The Loner" by Neil Young, sped up to the max, and a wild "Rotten To The Core" that turns the English anarcho-punks Rudimentary Peni — a band definitely worth seeking out — into hard-hitting stoner idols. And how can you not admire his ability to channel John Lennon on "Isolation", the former Beatle's own song, with the inspired touch of swapping the original's piano for guitar? Ty Segall isn't afraid to go toe to toe with the sacred monsters of the past: what he pulls off isn't the cockiness of a newcomer chasing a flashy stunt for visibility, but the focused tribute of an artist who by now can be considered on the same level. A touch of tedium creeps in with the less unrestrained tracks (the Dils' "Class War") or those tackled with an acoustic approach (Gong's "Pretty Miss Titty", Sparks' "Slowboat"), or when he reworks War's "Lowrider" without much inspiration. But Ty plays and has a blast, and he makes the listener have a blast too, picking eleven covers that also have the merit of sending us back to the wonderful originals, many of which had been guiltily gathering dust at the back of our memory for years. The endless joy of hearing a great musician play with respectful irreverence.

2019 opens with the release of a live album, Deforming Lobes, a selection drawn from three shows held at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles in January 2018. Mastering duties were handled by Steve Albini, who helped give the sound the power we can hear, pursuing the (agreeable) aesthetic choice of pushing the songs to the fore rather than the crowd, which is kept in the background of the final mix.
Eight tracks of great energy that highlight Segall's "heavier" side, ranging from the structured "old school" jams "Warm Hands" and "Love Fuzz" (not by chance placed at either end of the tracklist) to the thunderous songs that burn violently in little more than two minutes ("Squealer", "Breakfast Eggs", "The Crawler", "They Told Me Too").

On August 2 of the same year comes First Taste, with which the Californian whiz-kid pulls off a double miracle: on one hand he manages to preserve his trademark electric garage sound while setting the guitars aside (this time he focuses on drums), on the other he further expands his already vast horizons, adding brand new shades. Hence the blossoming of the psychedelic gospel contained in "Ice Plant", an a cappella track recalling the Beatles of "Because", the bucolic atmospheres underlined by the mandolin in "The Arms" and the incursions of horns and unconventional instruments that color "Whatever" and much of the rest of the record.
There's no shortage of the usual fuzz-driven assaults in the opener "Taste", the wholesome rhythmic pummeling of the brisk "The Fall" (a sort of "Brianstorm" retrofitted to the '60s, complete with drum solo), the more experimental leanings of the two short bursts of "When I Met My Parents" and the instrumental digression that enriches "Self Esteem". While it must be acknowledged that we're a long way from the all-encompassing kaleidoscope that was "Freedom's Goblin", First Taste still shows further sonic evolutions, along with a few flashes of genius, as in the closing "Lone Cowboys", which unfolds amid pseudo-Balkan aromas, visions of Zappa and glam à la Bolan. Elusive Segall. Impossible to pin down.

In early August 2021, Segall surprise-released, with no advance notice, Harmonizer, initially made available only on the major digital platforms, with a physical release following that October. Segall co-produced and co-mixed "Harmonizer" together with Cooper Crain at Harmonizer Studios in Topanga, California. Taking part in the recordings were Denée Segall, who wrote the lyrics and sang on "Feel Good" as well as handling the artwork, and several members of the Freedom Band: bassist Mikal Cronin, drummer and percussionist Charles Moothart, guitarist Emmett Kelly and pianist Ben Boyer.
Harmonizer doesn't deliver any particularly new flashes of genius, but it's still a record that follows in the wake of his best work, even if it lacks the decisive spark needed to reach excellence. "Whisper" and "Eased" make for a good start, after the brief instrumental intro "Learning", but it's in the second half that the album saves its best moments. These arrive in particular with the adrenaline rush of "Waxman" — a worthy heir to the best moments of Fuzz — and with the aforementioned "Feel Good", which, thanks to the female vocal contribution, marks a significant break from the rest. In all, 35 minutes of solid psych-rock, a genre in which Segall is by now a global authority, and which confirm his status of authority and respect within his scene.

In 2022, having completed the soundtrack for "Whirlybird", Segall attempts an alternate path: putting fuzz, big guitars and lysergic psychedelia in the attic for a moment, to craft ten mostly acoustic tracks. The result is Hello, Hi, on which the Californian rocker combines the glam flavors of Bolan with the flower-power vibes of Donovan, adding splashes of Neil Young and Beatles on the Harrison side, chewing it all up and spitting it back out in his own way, and paying tribute to the Mantles with a cover of "Don't Lie".
Segall plays almost every instrument himself, in his own studio, with only a few contributions from trusted collaborators, among them Mikal Cronin, who takes the sax solo in the second half of "Saturday". Harmonious and introspective, built on simplicity even amid its constant pursuit of the dissonant element, Hello, Hi is an acoustic-folk celebration that doesn't leave its author's fury at the door. It's inevitable, then, that electric guitars resurface, decisively so on the imperious title track, and more restrained on "Looking At You" and "Saturday, Pt. 2". Segall chases unpredictability without sacrificing energy, in a light and thoroughly enjoyable transitional work.

Two years later Segall is back with his solo project, delivering his fifteenth and lengthy effort Three Bells (2024). The record picks up from the psych-folk-inspired sounds explored previously, here with an eye on the work of Neutral Milk Hotel, freely mixing in a multitude of influences from progressive rock, post-punk, jazz-rock, hard rock, and the inevitable garage-rock jolts. As for the few collaborations featured, why change a winning team: the Californian multi-instrumentalist plays most of the instruments on the record, with production support from Cooper Crain and contributions from the usual faithful — Emmett Kelly (bass and guitars), Mikal Cronin (bass), Charles Moothart (drums), Ben Boye (keyboards) and Denée Segall.
The golden boy of Laguna Beach plays his ace immediately: the rhythm section marking out the folky intro of the sprawling "The Bell" gathers strength bit by bit, ripples against mechanical guitar riffs and incorporates details typical of the harmonic prog-rock of early Genesis, along with garage-rock peaks at the close, establishing itself as one of the best tracks on the record. What follows carries on in a similar conceptual vein, amid the psychedelic crescendos driven by keyboards, guitar phrasing and retro backing vocals of "Void".

The crooked electric flashes of "I Hear" gradually build up, spilling into stoner references echoing Queens Of The Stone Age, continuing along the hard rock line with the repetitive drive and overbearing bass of "Hi Dee Dee", which slides through passages pointing toward Cream and Beck, Bogert & Appice, toward an ending featuring a Jack White-esque guitar riff. "My Best Friend" shifts pace slightly, leaning on the bass-drums pairing and adopting post-punk sounds, while the melancholy progressions of "Reflections" open the way to the magnetic "Move", where Denée takes the lead amid rolling drums and polyrhythms, before crashing into an abrupt close. The odd "Eggman" sways on lopsided riffs and verses, dissolving into a cloud of noise and giving way to "My Room", driven by fuzz tones and an acidic closing guitar solo; it's followed by the heavy "Watcher", which revisits the folk-progressive-garage mix.

From the first signs of "Repetition" onward, one could say nomen omen, since from here on the last handful of songs (more experimental in nature) feels superfluous and doesn't seem to add any notable twists to the record, ending up only diluting it. There follow the usual repetitive interlocking patterns of "To You", which rides on acoustic guitars and synthetic glimmers, the prog-tinged flourishes of "Wait", seasoned with electric clouds and further nods to Jack White at the close; the stylistic exercises of the vacant "Denée" and the two-voice acoustic closer that recalls "Hello, Hi", "What Can We Do".
The hour-and-five-minute journey of Three Bells sets off from a high level, with strong moments and excellent ideas, both in terms of sound and of the themes explored — love, friendship and the nature of the self — though it loses itself in a bit too much pedantry, especially in its final stretch.

Ty Segall continues to juggle the conventions and customs of rock music with his ever-pyrotechnic and compelling self-made-musician attitude, skillfully coordinating languages and artistic approaches that don't always sit naturally together.
Possession (2025), the Californian musician's sixteenth album, is yet another change of scenery, but also one of his most classic chapters. The most significant novelty is that the central role is entrusted not only to the guitar but also to the piano, Segall's latest artistic conquest. With Neil Young and Brian Wilson as spiritual guides, the American musician ventures into a sonic excursion that places West Coast tradition, glam rock and the Beatles on the same plane, with a series of beautifully crafted compositions and arrangements rich in detail and inspiration.

For the lyrics, Ty Segall once again teams up with director and writer Matt Yoka; the compositions are more ambitious but also more explicit and direct, starting with the splendid "Shoplifter": a triumph of acoustic chords, perfectly interlocking vocals, brilliant string and horn arrangements (courtesy of the shrewd Mikal Cronin), typically Beatlesque psychedelic dissonances, and harmonic shifts that charm with every listen.
That the record is a celebration of '60s and '70s pop rock is obvious. Before reasserting his Californian power-pop attitude with the irrepressible "Another California Song", Segall flirts with a multitude of variations on the theme. There's the simplicity/non-simplicity of the Kinks in the delicately rough "Shining", there's the genius of John Lennon in the visionary, psychedelic "Hotel", there are the Grateful Dead in the uptempo Ziggy/Bowie-style ballad that also serves as the title track, and the descent into the glam underworld of Marc Bolan is almost perfect on the ambiguous "Fantastic Tomb", which doesn't shy away from blues inflections.
The decidedly rock-blues stride of "The Big Day" (complete with a guitar intro worthy of "All The Young Dudes"), the soul groove of "Buildings" and the creative melting pot of "Skirts Of Heaven" (Kinks, Love and Chicago all in the same song) confirm that Ty Segall has no fear whatsoever of bringing his sources of inspiration out into the open, in many cases even emulating '70s recording techniques, thus crafting one of the most successful albums of his career.

A year later, the lesson of Possession (2025) is called back into question with a gesture of pure, furious necessity. Chrome (2026) is not a return to the past, but proof that that lesson has been absorbed: now Segall knows he can afford to be direct, brutal, without that meaning giving up complexity. Recorded with the Freedom Band in a state of grace, the album is a concentrate of energy that allows no respite: guitars that don't accompany but attack, rhythms chasing something that doesn't want to be caught, quiet/loud dynamics handled with now-instinctive mastery.
Hard rock, proto-punk, psychedelic flights, the most jagged garage sounds — it's all filtered through a sensibility that is no longer that of the twenty-something plundering the past, but that of someone who has internalized that past and gives it back as a mother tongue. Chrome is a physical, dirty record, one that demands to be played at criminal volume, and which in its more melodic turns reveals the most important lesson Segall has learned in twenty years of career: that beneath the chaos there's always a song, and that the song is what's left when the fuzz dies down. Not a conclusion, but a new beginning: confirmation that the urgency was never a trick, but a necessity.

It's not easy to predict what this 'Little Caesar' of contemporary garage rock has in store for the future. The latest risky turn came with Possession (2025), a record that showed a Segall capable of looking at his idols without the frenzy of quotation, and then with Chrome (2026), the frontal assault that brought his band back to playing as if the amplifier were a living creature to be provoked to the point of collapse — a record that doesn't ask to be contemplated, but to be gone through. Together, these two works tell the story of a musician who has stopped trying to prove something and has learned to come to terms with his own shadow, turning excess from a curse into fuel. Perhaps the next step will be the start of a new cycle, or perhaps the phantom band with John Dwyer prophesied by Larry Hardy. But one thing is certain: the Segall serial has not stopped, and judging by Chrome, it has no intention of doing so.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("Fudge Sandwich", "Deforming Lobes", "First Taste", "Fuzz III", "Harmonizer", "Hello, Hi"), Martina Vetrugno ("Three Bells"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Possession"), Ljós Berinn ("Chrome")

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