Ty Segal
Possession
★★★★
DRAG CITY
One minute and two seconds into The Beatles’ She Loves You, there’s a vocal punctuation that sends music off on a whole new trajectory: the Fabs united, as a collective Little Richard, letting out an ecstatic “woo!” (or perhaps an “ooh!”: what do you hear?). It’s pop’s capacity for joy, energy, spontaneity and boundless possibilities articulated in a split second.
The seventeenth solo album by Ty Segall, prolific and sometimes frustrating Californian garage rocker, may not have quite the same cultural impact. But after three minutes and 13 seconds of Possession’s title track, Segall drops his very own “woo!” – an unconscious signal, perhaps, that this complicated rock classicist has hit on a more direct mode of expression.
Segall is one of those frantic multi-taskers – Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer would be a decent comparison – whose surfeit of good ideas don’t always act in his best interest. From gnarly roots in the late 2000s, Segall has made a series of occasionally terrific records (2012’s Twins and 2018’s Freedom’s Goblin are especially recommended) that flit around garage, glam, psychedelia, acid folk, metal, post-punk, art-prog, grunge and most other genres covered by MOJO. Inspired restlessness has seemed his default mode, with a kind of apotheosis in 2019 when he made a high-concept garage rock album (First Taste) without any guitars on it. At the same time, though, there’s always been a debt to The Beatles percolating around within Segall’s vast discography: a certain elegant way with a tune, a Lennonish rasp, that’s suggested he could make a more straightforward album, with a little more appeal beyond the garage rock illuminati. Possession is essentially that record, one where his Beatlesy nous aligns to a sort of strutting glam-baroque, without losing the dynamism that made Segall’s scrappier projects such fun.
So, Another California Song has some slightly more compromised “woos”, and an electric piano progression that’s pure Lennon, but it’s blown wide open by a horn section (Segall plays everything here except the brass and strings), with Segall’s customarily rearing fuzz tone dialled right back. And while his glam fetish has previously resulted in an album of lo-fi Marc Bolan covers (2015’s Ty Rex), here it’s elevated to another level entirely: The Big Day, strikingly, arrives with the insouciant pomp and curlicued guitars of All The Young Dudes.
If Possession stays more musically on point, lyrically it ranges further, with the words co-written by film-maker Matt Yoka. Often, these are stories of desperate measures taken in straitened times: the impoverished subject of chamber-pop beauty Shoplifter; the mysterious negotiations that occur in Hotel. Fantastic Tomb is a densely-detailed thriller riding on Possession’s most insistent groove, where the narrator is recruited to help burgle a mansion, only to end up imprisoned in the basement.
The title track, meanwhile, turns out to be an ornate but punchy retelling of the Salem Witch Trials, plus Ziggy Stardust flash – Segall goes full Ronno straight after that aforementioned “woo!”. “Bridget was the first who hung/ Though she is not the evil one” might not make for a song quite as universally uplifting as She Loves You, of course, but it still works as a fine entry point into Segall’s rich catalogue. His best album? Well, you know that can’t be bad…
Possession is out May 30 on Drag City.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade |HMV
Track listing:
Shoplifter
Possession
Buildings
Shining
Skirts Of Heaven
Fantastic Tomb
The Big Day
Hotel
Alive
Another California Song
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