Tonight marks the end of a long tour for Ty Segall and his band. But if the San Franciscan garage-psych firebrand is feeling the burn of months on the road, as the band’s cowboy buddy Jimmy Longhorn puts it when introducing them, he’s not letting it show.
“We’re gonna find a black hole and go and get lost and never come back,” yells Segall, as piercing feedback rings from the speakers, ominously suggesting a bloody-minded noise workout on the horizon. But that’s not Ty’s style, and soon volume gives way to tunes, massive ones at that: effervescent, hook-laden and in love with the simple thrill of chord-changes tolled on buzzsaw guitars.
Segall taps into a strong lineage with his fuzz-driven pop – from the bone-simple songcraft of the White Stripes, through the grunged-up melodies of Nirvana, to the primordial punch of Black Sabbath and the raw kicks of the original garage mavericks. The likes of It’s Over and Feel, with their needling hooks and squalling psych guitar, could easily be undiscovered garage-rock nuggets. But they’re no retro relics tonight, Segall and band attacking them with wild glee and joyriding them like stolen cars, full of life and chaos and cacophonic joy.
The songs come fast and easy, as they always do to Segall – new album Manipulator’s only the latest in an avalanche of releases over the last few years. Girlfriend is about as sublime as this kind of pop gets, all hand-claps, roaring guitar and massive playground choruses. On The Singer, meanwhile, Segall becomes more whimsical, like Marc Bolan’s manic pixie dream boy, reborn in the body of a doughy blonde Californian surfer.
As the 70-minute hurtle draws to a ragged close, the tunes bleeding back into feedback, Ty announces that he’s “off to catch the last bus to Jupiter”. Black hole avoided, he’s reaching for the stars – and given his knack for such glorious pop noise, they’re within his reach.
