Garage-rock wunderkind Ty Segall live at Spaceland Friday
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At the tender age of 23, San Francisco’s incredibly prolific nouveau garage/psych tunesmith Ty Segall is poised on the brink of widespread success. With a feverish output that has included four full-length albums and a handful of seven-inch singles (which doesn’t include his work with other bands, including Thee Oh Sees and Sic Alps, or his split LP with distortion heavy British garage combo Black Time), he’s been burning the candle at both ends for the last couple of years. All that blood, sweat and tears is starting to pay off: Segall was a cover boy in the June issue of punk rock ‘zine Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll and has recently received accolades from high-profile sources such as Spin and Pitchfork.
With good reason. The basement-recorded “Melted,” his latest album from Memphis garage-punk stalwart Goner Records, is a brain-frying excursion into poppy psychedelia that incorporates acoustic arrangements, slow tempos and influences that range from grunge to garage and beyond. With the album’s colorful tapestry of catchy and crafted songs, Segall has moved away from the lo-fi aesthetic of many of his earlier recordings to embrace a cleaner, more polished rock ‘n’ roll approach. Segall has described it as sounding like “cherry cola, snow cones and taffy.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s lost any of the blazing garage-rock energy that fires up his live performances, as attendees at Friday night’s Spaceland show will discover. A recent all-ages performance at the Smell, powered by lithe and thunderous songs such as the fuzzy, falsetto-driven “Caesar” (which concludes on the record with a flute solo) and the stomping Troggs-influenced “My Sunshine,” worked the youthful audience into a frothing sea of flailing, tattooed arms and bobbing heads. Friday’s show, at a bigger venue with a better sound system and the availability of alcohol, is likely to be even better.
-- Jason Gelt
Take a listen to “Caesar” below:
Ty Segall at Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., L.A. 8:30 p.m. Friday. Tickets are $8 advance, $12 at the door.
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