Whether under his own name or from various side projects, Ty Segall has kept new music waiting around the corner for years. Over a mountain of releases, he's proven that he can shred multiple times over, and that he can match that intensity in his acoustic singer/songwriter mode. It's fair to ask what else he can do at this point. With Emotional Mugger, we've arrived at a turning point for Segall: After inundating us for years, what can he do to keep people listening?
Emotional Mugger needed to be special to stand apart—a shock to the Segall system—and he hints at a new aesthetic direction from the outset. Where his last album Manipulator opened with stately organ, the synthesizers on Mugger are abrasive and off-kilter. Throughout the album, he is less focused on hitting the exact right notes and more concerned with establishing an offbeat vibe, one matching the cheerful menace of the smiling doll heads on the sleeve. The pace and structure of "California Hills" is briefly upended a few times for short bursts of frantic guitar work, and throughout the album, he switches between his traditional singing voice and a throaty, affected mystic dirtbag caricature.
There's also an underlying narrative, although it would be a reach to call it a full-on "concept album." Each song seems to be an oblique short story about cheap thrills, and throughout, his metaphor of choice is candy. The album's populated with addicts—people engineered to come back for more despite how shitty it may ultimately make them feel. Sub out the word "candy" for pretty much any other vapid, hollow pleasure in the world (and sometimes you wish he would—I respect his wish to keep his metaphors consistent, but occasionally his repetition of the same words leads the songs to blur together).
Since it's an album sending up society's constant demand for instant gratification, it feels petty and impatient to occupy its world thinking, "This hook was cool at first, but it's losing my attention." But that's the truth of Emotional Mugger—a few songs just churn over the same hook, and ultimately, there's just not enough happening to hold interest. Despite an assist from Mikal Cronin and Melvins' Dale Crover, Segall's take on Eddy Grant's Equals song "Diversion" is repetitive, unvarying, and notably less interesting than the source material.
Thankfully, it's a Segall album, which means his missteps are tempered by a few phenomenal performances. "Candy Sam" features one of his best big-tent guitar solos on record, though the album's best song is "Mandy Cream"—there's not much else that sounds like it in Segall's discography. The drums root the song in funk (courtesy of Segall's frequent collaborator Charles Moothart) while a droning synthesizer and his guitar solo bring both percussive supplements and weird punk hooks into the fold. Also worth noting: There are vocals from King Tuff.
That's another major departure for Segall on Emotional Mugger—his team. In addition to his usual co-conspirators Cronin and Moothart, he's surrounded himself by heavy-hitters like Kyle Thomas, producer F. Bermudez (who helmed recent records by Gun Outfit and No Age), Wand's Cory Hanson and Evan Burrows, and the Cairo Gang's Emmett Kelly. And with his collaborators (dubbed "the Muggers") at his side, he's done an excellent job of establishing an unsettling tone across the album—one where cooing moans of pleasure on "Baby Big Man (I Want a Mommy)" are bulldozed by him grunting the words "BIG MAN."
When Segall rolled out the album by mailing VHS copies to writers, he shared a clinical definition of "emotional mugging," explaining, "The over-communication relayed in cell based technology and content driven media further detaches passengers of our modern society from deep emotional understanding." Put more simply: The Internet makes everything and anything immediately available, and that's probably fucking up how people interact and have their desires addressed. It's a relevant subject without question—one he addresses on the album with varying degrees of success. Maybe its diciest moments can be chalked up to the album's inherent feeling of uneasiness, but Emotional Mugger still feels transitional—either the moment before he tucks in and gets way weirder or another stepping stone before he switches gears all over again.
