“Meaning” even features his wife putting out a good punk anthem to scream along to.įrom beginning to end, there is something to enjoy from Freedom’s Goblin. Tall” and “Shoot You Up”, to even more retro and calmer tracks such as “Rain” and “I’m Free”, there are plenty of songs that fit Freedom Goblin’s repertoire. There may be a lot to go through, but it flies through quickly, with many tracks to love. His sound production emulates garage rock as wonderful as always, with the guitar and drum work offering what he does best. There is a maturity to each of those older styles. Ty is drawing a lot from the past in this album, including his style from his older works like the distorted psychedelic 60s in Melted, and the distorted fuzz in Slaughterhouse. The garage-psychedelic-fuzz rock is here and longer than ever before, so what is there to complain about? His 10 th album clocks in at 74 minutes with 19 tracks – quite a marathon compared to his usual under 40-minute albums he has put out in the last few years. The yearly release of Ty Segall has come upon us once again with Freedom’s Goblin, an album surprisingly longer than what is usually expected from his usual. Improving with every subsequent release, he’s an ascendant non-luddite, non-backtracking garage figurehead for an age of increasing unreality, a mouthpiece of the sempiternal primal garage yelp.Key Tracks: “Alta”, “Cry Cry Cry”, “And, Goodnight”
Ty Segall culls some some of his scene’s most appealing aspects and affixes them to unusually-written, melodically appealing songs in essence, he’s an ideal ambassador for his Bay Area milieu. Some songs even deal with locality lyrically: “California Commercial” sends up the continuing American fantasy of the West Coast as destination, while “Comfortable Home” questions a lover’s desire for a domestic living situation ( “She says she wants to buy a couch/ I said why do we have to buy the couch?”), but it’s a nauseated warmth about his sound that really “places” it. The most notable uniting factor between these bands - The Fresh & Onlys, Sonny & The Sunsets, and others in their vicinity - is not a quantifiable one it’s a loose, tape-deck physicality, a textural sense of place. The change-jingling saunter of a tempo at which most of the album runs brings Segall in line with the often noisier onetime bandmates Sic Alps. The vocals on Goodbye Bread, more noticeably warped on burlier tracks like “My Head Explodes,” clip and buzz, accentuating the throaty, amelodic qualities of Segall’s mutable voice like John Dwyer’s on Thee Oh Sees’ records. Yet under further scrutiny, the song reveals an array of stylistic quirks that tie it to some of Segalls’s more visible friend-contemporaries. It’s an able, even catholic (small “c”) pop song it feels like, cleaned of some of its sonic smut, it could’ve been made anywhere in the world in any given post-60s decade. Its solo hits all expected peaks, finally sidling alongside the refrain to close out the track.
The song’s lyrically-indistinct chorus falls into place with an ease that can be appreciated by the most untrained, Clear-Channeled ear. On “You Make The Sun Fry,” Segall’s baritone crests and squirms over a thick, universally “rock” descending riff. Example: The Hives and The Vines are from Fagersta and Sydney, respectively, yet they are, for all intents and purposes, the same shitty mid-aughts band.Īt first go-round, Goodbye Bread - the most recent bunch of songs by Ty Segall, SoCal-bred younger brother to the preternaturally fecund San Fran psych-garage scene - bears few marks of local flavor.
Without this sense of locality, the music loses its meaning. The “garage” descriptor, after all, is a place and not a sound. Even as we begin to migrate our musical existences into The Cloud, rock ‘n’ roll remains an artform of earthbound physical presence. Yet there’s one defining element of garage rock (and punk, for that matter) that’s overtly threatened by our technological future: its development and resurgence via regional scenes. We can cure cancer or build a car that runs on water, but we’ll never shake the feeling that this town’s gotten too goddamned uptight for its own good. Forty years from now, we may be 3D-printing shit directly from our minds, but based on our culture’s trajectory over the past half-century, it’s a safe wager we’ll still be listening to shaggy-fringed bastards with axes bestatic’d yelp over sloppy-edged drums. Garage rock exists in a state of constant revival.