TY SEGALL - Ty Segall

When the fateful eponymous album comes along for an artist who's no newcomer, it's natural to assume the record already carries an extra weight of reflection on one's own life and career, something the musician felt a certain urgency to fix in song form. This may well be a commonplace, but it's not unusual for such works to present themselves to listeners with the shape and prerogatives of an ideal summing-up. If that premise holds almost invariably true for singer-songwriters, it's a whole different story when applied to ironic, wayward rockers like Ty Segall. Not coincidentally, this is someone who'd already put out a self-titled record almost at the very start of his career, yet here he still seems to be sending out a couple of significant signals: first and foremost, the dusting-off of the classic lineup from the good old days, with Charlie Moothart on drums and Mikal Cronin on bass, and then the surprises represented by a trio of top-notch additions — Emmett Kelly on guitar and Ben Boye on piano (both already associates of Bonnie Prince Billy and active in the Cairo Gang project) — alongside production entrusted to none other than Steve Albini.

The calling card is a sonic wall of quite remarkable proportions. Albini evidently served to clear the slate, allowing a return in a sense to the source, to that dirty, direct sound unburdened by the many hard or prog superstructures picked up along the way. Ty's sound thus goes back to being full-spectrum, ground-zero rock: roaring, drenched in reverb, biting and martial, still dripping with swagger and bravado — even downright anthemic, judging by what the furious opener "Break A Guitar" dares to attempt — but essentially stripped of misleading formal overthinking. On "Freedom" the Californian goes so far as to openly claim his right to freedom, and in his case freedom corresponds precisely to the blazing authenticity of his earliest days, to pedals stomped with gleeful ferocity, to the pots-and-pans clatter of the Epsilons, to the swagger and youthful naivety he seemed to have given up on. Of course, the man wouldn't be fully himself without indulging in a bit of blatant 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, now as then, is an exhilarating nonchalance along with a firepower that's still formidable, despite the many albums logged in the meantime. So in his wild yet thoroughly entertained rampages, Segall has fun oscillating between placid digressions and full-frontal, feral assaults. The now-familiar array of oddities is this time reduced to a scattered gallery of flourishes rather than the rather hard-to-digest expressive quirks of its predecessor. The approach of the new "Ty Segall" is pleasantly straightforward, aiming to put together an unpretentious breviary (and precisely for that reason, a fairly convincing one), ranging widely from the lopsided power-pop of "Papers" to the more sun-streaked, 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 most bluntly rock'n'roll side of Lennon, amid a euphoric, abrasive sonic climate of "no prisoners taken".

The garage-punk outburst "Thank You Mr. K", complete with broken shards, further widens the range of references, though without ever fully tipping into the post-scenarios opened up, not without success, by the latest of his projects, Gøggs, staying instead more geared toward the thrill of the lark itself than toward the trappings of philological correctness, of loving, genre-specific homage. And while "Orange Color Queen" brings back the acoustic, mildly psych crystals of "Sleeper", albeit with a far more easygoing tone than that record's grave, composed one, "Talkin'" offers an unusual little sour-blues page: a blurred snapshot, as on the cover, of a chapped, worn-out, even aged Ty, as enjoyable as ever, with that vaguely crepuscular inflection and a piano that seem placed there on purpose to remind us not to take him too seriously.

No, this is certainly not some calculated summing-up, but rather a self-portrait that's presumably meant to be truthful, representative, let's say. We could be wrong, but the impression is that the golden boy and his gang haven't had this much fun recording a new album in a very long time, not since "Goodbye Bread" or thereabouts, and the same should go for the listener. The return to the eponymous title, perhaps, is explained above all by just that.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

09/02/2017