Ty Segall might need been getting forward of himself final 12 months when he advised an interviewer he was making an attempt to decelerate. “I like being prolific, however generally it lessens the entire thing, I really feel like, which isn’t what I would really like,” he stated. “So, I’m really making an attempt to not launch as a lot anymore.” Proper. Shortly thereafter, the ever-industrious storage rocker gave us Love Rudimentsan LP consisting totally of percussion instrumentals. It was a logical endpoint for the part of airtight experimentation that Segall entered circa 2018, wherein every new file tackled a distinct aesthetic: the unrecognizably deep-fried covers of Fudge Sandwichthe synth-pop dreamscapes of Harmonizer, the basement-dwelling prog-punk of Three Bells.
Now approaching 40, Segall reveals no indicators of slowing down. However his new album, Possession, means that the exploratory interval could be coming to a detailed, a minimum of for now. This can be a little bit of a back-to-basics file for him, which is to say that it falls someplace within the matrix of glam-inflected psychedelia that broadly defines his catalogue from Goodbye Bread to the magisterial double LP Freedom’s Goblin. In comparison with his earlier albums, although, Possession developments towards a hotter, extra brazenly nostalgic model of stadium rock, filled with power-pop jams and feel-good anthems.
A lot of the levity comes from the broader palette at Segall’s disposal. There’s an nearly Steely Dan-ish buoyancy to the horns that blast on many choruses, and a string quartet lends a breezy dignity to a great portion of the songs. On “Possession,” Segall takes what initially appears like an electro-convulsed “Ziggy Stardust” and slowly refashions it right into a brass-driven epic worthy of David Clayton-Thomas period Blood, Sweat & Tears, which could be so far as he has gotten from the stripped-down thrasher rock of his youth. As if to retrace that evolution in actual time, “Shoplifter,” a music a couple of destitute kleptomaniac, begins as a sparse storage dirge and steadily accretes instrumental layers till it climaxes with two saxophones chasing one another’s tails as violins climb into the ether.
Segall co-wrote most of Possession’s lyrics with Matt Yoka, who has directed the majority of the rocker’s music movies, together with the one wherein Segall sits immobile on the heart of an more and more rowdy kegger, making an attempt to sing the plaintive “Goodbye Bread” as half-naked revelers flail and stumble upon him. The file is populated by equally poker-faced loners making an attempt to shrug off the absurdity of a world in sluggish decline. “Smoke in the summertime/The metallic style like rubber,” Segall sings over an ominous, burbling synth line on “Resort”: “Site visitors within the ocean/Assist me with the lotion.”
However that ethereal nonchalance is a part of what makes Possession really feel like a barely lower-stakes effort for Segall, as if in spite of everything his latest experiments, he was content material to easily bask within the glow of his classic-rock information for some time. On “Implausible Tomb,” he channels Edgar Allan Poe in spinning a gothic story about being lured right into a cellar, however the music’s strutting dad-rock groove sounds prefer it may very well be a Grand Funk Railroad B-side, dashed off between stops on Segall’s final tour. “I do know you need to sing one other California tune/So sing alongside to a different California music,” Segall sings on “One other California Tune.” This quintessentially fuzzed-out power-pop anthem would possibly as properly be a mission assertion for the file. The album is filled with acquainted strikes—however comfortingly so, heralding a return to the California songs which have lengthy made Segall the golden boy of the Golden State’s psychedelic revival.
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