The problem with this review? I have almost no idea which songs Ty Segall and his band played – okay I figured out a few once home because I had recordedsome of them – but I am not familiar enough with their huge catalogue, and he seemed to decide what song to play on set, with a totally laid-back attitude and without a setlist on view. Just imagine, this guy has released three albums, ‘Twins’, as himself, ‘Hair’, as Ty Segall and white Fence, and ‘Slaughterhouse’ as Ty Segall band just in 2012! So I guess someone has to tell him to slow down because no one can follow such a prolific career.
But Ty Segall and his three-piece band were playing a free in-store show at Permanent Records, a cool vinyl store where I had never been, and despite a minor technical problem at the beginning of their set, they totally blew the place away. With his smart mixture of loud, fast, garage-punk-rock and some surf-y-psychedelic detours à la The Oh Sees, they brought the energy to the roof as soon as they started their set, and damn, they were good! It sounded a little retro and totally fresh at the same time, never nostalgic but like a brand new take on rock’ n’ roll.
It was my third time seeing the band, the first time was at the Echoplex a few years ago and this loudness had started some serious stage diving, the second time was at the FYF fest and no need to say that his set had also launched a large cloud of dust from all the crowd body-surfing agitation. This time the place was way too small and too packed for any mayhem, but the spirit was there.
The tunes were extremely catchy, Beatles-catchy, as there was a little bit of the fab four behind the fuzziness, the distortion and the buried vocals. They started with ‘Johnny’, off 'Lemons', a song with screamed vocals and flowing fast riffs, which had all the rage of true punk rock in the best sense of the term, and from there, they hardly stopped to breathe. ‘This is a San Francisco song’, said the musician whose long beach-blonde hair was masking his face most of the time and floating along the aggressive guitar riffs. But when I say aggressive, I should rather say dynamic with a torrential flow, as the delivery was more harmonious than destructive, despite all these hairy head moves. The San Francisco song (‘The Hill’) started with some beautiful quiet harmonies, but nothing in their set staying quiet very long, it soon went into a wild 70s-inspired psychedelic rock.
They played for close to one hour, for free, and for some happy customers in this tiny place, building a fuzzy noisy wall of genres, even playing a cover that Shazam didn’t recognize (what a surprise!) and alternating between new and old song – according to Ty. He took a different guitar for the last song and it was a very short one, as most of the other ones,… The crowd was cheering and applauding at each song and Ty Segall sounded like some unassuming savior of rock’ n‘ roll.