Ty Segall has never been a wallflower. The Southern California garage-rock prodigy rivals fellow scene members (Thee) Oh Sees in prolific output, producing a wealth of records and side projects that, in aggregate, form a wall of brash, defiant noise. His cover of Funkadelic’s “Hit It and Quit It,” from 2018’s excellent Fudge Sandwich, is emblematic of both his playfulness and his gnarly psychedelia: Popular music goes in one side of Segall’s reverse-exorcism machine and comes back fast, screechy, and rude.
Wasted Shirt, Segall’s joint project with noise rock iconoclast Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt, takes the alchemy a step further. The duo’s individual efforts have earned them well-deserved reputations as devoted experimentalists; their collaboration on Fungus II (they skipped right over installment I) represents two artists pulling each other closer to dangerous, interesting edges. Their brand of amelodic pandemonium has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.
The majority of the 12 songs on Fungus II clock in around three and a half minutes, brisk heirs apparent to Black Sabbath that sound ready to soundtrack skate videos. They’re abrasive, but like so much of Segall’s oeuvre they also telegraph a kind of fanboy earnestness—the baroque, metalhead shredding that might imply an inferiority complex in the hands of a lesser musician instead reads like homage, a love letter to blown-out speakers and the hours after a killer session of “Magic: The Gathering.”
Some tracks accomplish this bombast more successfully than others. On “Double the Dream,” reverb pings in each ear as Chippendale attacks the kit and and Segall shrieks: “Dream, dream!” The song ends with the sound of tape unspooling, racing towards the next set of ears. This propulsive quality owes a great deal to Chippendale’s rabid snares and cymbals, and it’s what makes many of these tracks so bracing. “I’m my own man/Yes, I am a hostage,” Segall groans on “Fist Is My Ward,” sounding positively deranged as Chippendale’s rhythms skitter behind with frightening speed.
When every song attempts the same jaws-of-life intensity, though, a few are bound to feel comparatively dim. “Harsho,” a midtempo vision of driving with “blood on the highway/blood on the wheel,” doesn’t accomplish the same menace as the songs surrounding it. The wild acoustic strumming and heavy ramp-up two-thirds of the way through “The Purple One” would stand out on another record, but beside Wasted Shirt’s weirder, wilder fare, they’re less remarkable.
On the seven-minute closer “Four Strangers Enter the Cement at Dusk,” the pair takes another approach: a deliberately plodding, reverberating walk-up to the cataclysmic moment when both musicians let loose and embrace basement-show chaos. Lengthy, instrumental indulgence is the point; the song showcases Segall and Chippendale’s adept interplay, balancing one’s fever with the other’s sanguinity, and then trading those roles or abandoning them altogether. Their chemistry is unmistakable. Fungus II is its alien-baby result.
Buy: Rough Trade
