Back in the ’60s, when bands like the Rolling Stones were averaging three new albums a year, they’d also drop quickie compilations along the way—like High Tides and Green Grass and Through the Past, Darkly—to summarize a particularly prolific period (or just cash-in on more casual fans). As someone who aspires to a ’60s Stones ideal—in terms of both his sheer level of output and his ever-evolving garage-rock aesthetic—Ty Segall is also wont to drop the occasional summary collection that allows the average listener to play catch-up. Except Segall is so restless and relentless, of course, that these compilations actually comprise all new material.
In the fall of 2012, Segall dropped Twins, an eclectic album that took a tasting-menu approach to the three aesthetically discrete albums that immediately preceded it. Likewise, Segall’s new album feels like a sampler of what he’s been up to in the half-decade since: the melancholic acoustic meditations of Sleeper, the classicist craftsmanship of Manipulator, the Marc Bolan séances of Ty Rex, the diseased, dementoid psych-punk of last year’s Emotional Mugger. Ty Segall is the second self-titled album in his discography (after his 2008 eponymous debut), seemingly because its 10 tracks offer a complete portrait of his many capabilities. But Ty Segall is more than just an easy entry point into his imposing catalog. The new album shows Segall has not only mastered several, stylistically divergent strains of rock—he’s becoming ever more adept at seamlessly stitching them together.
For someone with roots in a genre—garage-punk—that puts a premium on gritty authenticity, Segall has become increasingly fond of artifice, be it the Bolan-via-Barrett faux British accent that’s become his default vocal tic, the silver-lipstick vamping, or his use of Emotional Mugger as a vehicle to masquerade as a surrogate band and terrorize morning news programs. And that mischievous zeal is the glue that ultimately holds this album’s disparate pieces together, particularly when they collide in the same song. Bulldozing opener “Break a Guitar” forges a holy communion between Big Star melody and Black Sabbath brawn, and its cocksure attitude spills over to the stripped-down follow-up, “Freedom,” a scrappy, acoustic-powered number that recalls John Lennon’s frantic Abbey Road curio “Polythene Pam.”
But that’s not the only move Segall has cribbed from the second side of that Beatles classic. “Freedom” immediately gives way to an epic sequel, “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned),” a 10-minute multi-sectional suite that ricochets between warped glam-folk, proto-metal ferocity, sneering British Invasion swagger, overdriven fuzz-punk, and a jazzy guitar jam that attempts to out-Santana the Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” It’s the most ambitious, audacious piece of music Segall has ever produced, but he whisks through the song’s train-like structure with such manic glee that this colossal track ultimately feels as brisk and economical as a seven-inch single.
Given that it’s dropped early on in the No. 3 slot, “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)” casts a long shadow over the rest of the album—in its wake, even the sludgy stomper “The Only One” and the wild, glass-smashing roadhouse rave-up “Thank You Mr. K” feel a bit rote in comparison. But Segall wisely balances his most epic gestures to date with his most intimate, as Ty Segall’s back half yields the prettiest, most pristine pop songs he’s ever written: “Orange Color Queen” is a mash note to his girlfriend rendered in T. Rex’s mystic-lady language; the piano-rolled “Papers” wraps the album’s catchiest chorus around a cluttered-desk scene straight out of a late-’60s Kinks album. And on “Take Care (to Comb Your Hair),” Segall shrewdly builds a deceptively hippy-dippy folk song into a Who-sized barrage of finger-slicing windmill strums and kit-toppling drum rolls, effortlessly bridging the troubadour and trouble-maker sides of his personality.
Of course, Segall can’t help but follow up these handsomely packaged songs with “Untitled,” which is really just a four-second blurt of guitar noise that closes the album with all the subtlety of a fart let out in the most crucial moment of a wedding ceremony. But that throwaway gag nonetheless serves as a reminder of Segall’s most essential quality: his refusal to settle. Rather than chart a typically linear course from raw to refined, Segall has constructed a discography more like a zig-zagging thrill ride liable to careen off into any direction. And whether it’s the jarring track-to-track juxtapositions or within the shape-shifting songs themselves, Ty Segall shows that, nearly a decade into the game, the only predictable thing about Segall is his ability to continually surprise.
