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.
It kicks off with the hurtling Taste, a warning about the consequences of personal choices over a grinding, driving riff. Thereafter, the dozen tracks career through funky drumming, jerky grooves, eerie noises, distorted vocals and instruments from harmonizer to bouzouki. Ice Plant beautifully combines Who-referencing lyrics (“Let your love rain down over me”) and banks of harmonies, before sliding into a hauntingly sad piano refrain. The Fall’s walls of drumming and psychedelic noise may or may not be named after Mark E Smith’s band, but the mantra-like, guttural, growled I Worship the Dog is certainly reminiscent of later Fall work.
Elsewhere, the jam-like When I Met My Parents (Part 1) tires of itself after 63 seconds and the acoustic tracks have a happier vibe, with shades of Donovan and T Rex. The album slowly emerges as a deliberately obtuse sonic puzzle, which contains Segall’s most personal thoughts on childhood, family and self. “I sing my songs so I am free-uh …” he sings, tellingly, and “My life is a mystery, I’d look inside but I can’t see.”
Gradually, the maze reveals its gems. Radio mashes up psych-pop and Maharishi-era Beatles. The difficult-but-extraordinary Self Esteem’s startling horn blasts arrive like bouts of mental disturbance. The closing Lone Cowboys, too, is lovely. Wistful “ooh la la’s” lead to a sublime, melancholy discourse on outsider loneliness that should, ironically, win him more new friends.
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