Ty Segall - First Taste

The Guardian 80

(Drag City)
Distorted vocals, funky, jerky guitars, walls of drumming and banks of harmonies dissolve into sad pianos (sometimes) on Segall’s fantastic 13th solo effort

Over the last 11 years, Californian cult garage rocker Segall has released 13 solo albums, collaborated with Tim Presley on last year’s excellent Joy, played in countless short-lived bands and created a labyrinthine back catalogue that stretches from psychedelia to disco. The risk of pumping out ideas with such velocity is that it risks becoming like a musical version of the I’m Alan Partridge episode where the spoof TV host pitches ideas at a long-suffering programmer: “Inner City Sumo? How about Youth-Hostelling With Chris Eubank?” Somehow, Segall has avoided such a fate, and his 13th solo album pushes his sonic envelope ever further without many significant lapses in quality control.

The Guardian 80

(Drag City)

Garage rock made with saxophone, mandolin, Japanese koto and bouzouki? Most garage-inclined albums, even those of the psychedelic persuasion, don’t often leave the traditional band configuration. First Taste – which might be Ty Segall’s 12th solo studio album (it depends how you’re counting) – adds a music shop’s worth of exotic instrumentation and double drummers to this Californian’s driving, sprawling oeuvre.

Magnificently, songs like Taste or The Fall are only energised by these diverse sonic signatures. The double-drummers are key, too: Segall’s in the left-hand channel, while frequent collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Charles Moothart is in the right. Tracks such as I Worship the Dog (dogs are a recurrent theme in Segall’s work) simultaneously peddle protean sludge, ticklish percussiveness and heady drones. The skronk is fabulously full-on, but Segall’s Beatles fixation comes to the fore on sweeter-natured swirls like When I Met My Parents (Part 3) or Ice Plant, lightening the assault but not sparing the senses.

Pitchfork 75

Temporarily abandoning the guitar, the prolific garage rocker channels his indulgences and comes away with an unusually focused album.