Whenever Ty Segall’s name comes up, you know the word “prolific” is lingering just around the corner. And if you take minute to really consider how much music he’s put out in a career of about seven years – seven solo albums (that’s one a year since 2008) in addition to a relentless torrent of singles, EPs, side projects, like Fuzz (for which he plays drums and sings), and collaborations, like the album Hair he did with White Fence and Reverse Shark Attack with long-time friend and bandmate Mikal Cronin – you inadvertently find yourself asking, in a somewhat bemused fashion, “How the fuck does he make so much music?” But what’s truly striking about Segall’s preternatural output is not so much the sheer quantity of albums, singles, and side projects he’s involved with at any given time, but the quality control he’s (so far) been able to maintain.
Normally, and I’m sure you’ve all witnessed this firsthand, a band will really lock into a sound, producing one or two interesting and important albums, but will inevitably be pigeonholed by the pitchfork-wielding arbiters of cool, having run into a wall artistically, reaching the limits of their aesthetic. Such bands wind up operating for a while as pale imitations of themselves, and eventually are absorbed back into the shadows of obscurity. But Segall, with uncommonly light feet, has (again, so far) defied that trajectory. Just when you think he’ll hit a downturn, the boosters kick in and he ascends to new and greater heights.
If anything, his latest effort Manipulator, which was released this past Tuesday, attests to Ty Segall’s restless disposition, a freakish inability to stand still. The record is all over the place, but it’s all over the place in the best sense; listening to Manipulator, one can’t help but think of The White Album and its wonderful hodgepodge of songs, of how The Beatles created, essentially, a compilation of sonic non-sequiturs that work so brilliantly together only because John, Paul, George and Ringo are the ones playing them – I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that both The White Album and Manipulator are double-LPs of this sort. But if The White Album heralded the dissolution of a great band, Manipulator certainly marks the efflorescence of a young artist on the verge of greatness.
The thread binding together all of Manipulator’s disparate styles and sonic textures is the man himself; the sheer power of Ty Segall’s presence is what keeps Manipulator’s whole rickety architecture from collapsing under its own weight – and weight it does have: the album consists of 17 tracks and clocks in at just under an hour. What Ty Segall has to offer as a musician or an artist generally, what he not only brings but consistently delivers to his listeners, is not lyrical eloquence (he’s no poet), or even musical pyrotechnics (he’s no Hendrix), but a certain intensity that’s at once playful and dead serious. For proof, just listen to “Feel,” probably the hardest hitting song on Manipulator, the musical equivalent of a kick to the diaphragm, and pay close attention to middle section in which Segall’s not so much playing a guitar solo as throttling it out of the fucking thing – better yet, watch his performance of “Feel” on Conan. By song’s end, you wish it’d go on for another four minutes but are also kind of glad you can breath again.
In utter contrast to “Feel,” and other songs of that ilk, like “It’s Over” and “The Crawler,” Segall serves up somewhat more nuanced and delicate offerings. Take “The Singer,” for example, which is gentle – at least as gentle as Ty Segall’s capable of being – and decidedly not blown-out, leaving just enough room for a string section, which sits unassumingly in the background, to accompany the most mellifluous vocal performance he’s ever put to tape. There are traces of Segall’s unmistakable whine to the lilting, lovesick lyrics – “I can hear the sound/When my love’s around/Whistle in the trees/It sits inside the bees/When my love’s around” – which burst so satisfyingly into the sing-song chorus – “Sing, sing/Louder, louder…” – that you’re almost tempted to try to hit the highs Segall is struggling to reach himself. Listening to “The Singer,” you get the sense that Segall’s after something, and you’re not even sure if he knows what it is quite yet, but he makes it very clear that you’re coming along for the ride, willingly or not.
But “Feel” and “The Singer” are only two ends of a musical spectrum of considerable scope. Everything in between runs the gamut from the unabashedly danceable “Tall Man Skinny Lady” to glam-rock romp “The Faker,” which contains hints of “The Jean Genie” and a Marc Bolan off Electric Warrior, from the man who’s “gonna make a movie of his entire life” in “Green Belly” to “Susie Thumb” who just can’t seem to find freedom and fame through the screen of her iPhone. By turns, Manipulator is boneheaded and subtle, scathing and unironic, whimsical and utterly determined, but what remains constant throughout the album is an undeniably exultant quality. To call Manipulator “an unadulterated joy from start to finish,” as did Michael Hann writing for the Guardian – Even the Brits love Ty! – would by no means be an understatement.
What Ty Segall has, finally, accomplished with Manipulator is not only the distillation of everything he’s ever gone for musically into a single collection of songs but the freeing-up of an aesthetic. Instead of hitting a wall and exhausting all possibilities, Segall, with just the right amount of sincerity and a fuzz-box cranked way up, has expended the limits of a sound that, since its inception, never really ventured beyond the garage doors.
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