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Credit: Ty Segall
Ty Segall bemuses with equal brilliance and bewilderment on new album ‘Hello, Hi’
Ty Segall - 'Hello, Hi'
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Ty Segall will not make a conventional album. Whether he won’t or he can’t is irrelevant at this stage. Each and every outing is simultaneously a smorgasbord of delights and a splatter of canapes, frustratingly dropped before they could become a feast. Obviously, Hello, Hi is no different, as Segall refuses to break a lifetime of prolific habits.
It appears like he might at one point. The first section of the album unfurls like a reimagining of 1960s acid folk, and for a moment, your mind is walloped by the bemusing thought that he might actually carry this Segall-ised take on Donavan, Medicine Head, T. Rex, Sy Barrett, and the likes to fruition. Then seemingly out of boredom, he puts down the acoustic and starts shredding like a madman with the soaring titular track. It’s a great song in isolation, one of the album’s best, in fact, but it also comically pisses you off.
It’s very refreshing, as it always is, but coupled with all the dissonance in the music, it’s also very maddening. It’s the folk album that forgot to take its Ritalin. It’s brilliant. It’s barmy. It’s amusingly original. It’s a question of what could’ve been. There are moments when it all clicks and seems honed down to the sort of thing that could be considered a single with the beauteous ‘Don’t Lie’, then perhaps out of laziness, his own curiosity or some other mystic muse guide, he wonders how many bum notes he can cram into the overly unmelodious ‘Saturday Pt. 1’.
However, part of the wonder of the album is that I only voice these moments of frustration scattered throughout because I love it too. It’s much like the mantra of the magnificent ‘Saturday Pt 2’ – a track that harks back to his masterpiece ‘My Lady’s on Fire’ – things fall into place in rosy moments of drunken celebration, but then comes the hangover, the malaise, and the irritation.
It’s an album much like alcohol itself, full of promise in the right light, chequered with amazing moments and highlights that will stick with you, and littered with drawbacks and the sense that you should cut back and gather some focus. It’s as messy as a Monday morning, and yet it eviscerates the maudlin march of the drab every day (and mundane music) like the assegai of original weekend plans in someplace new, someplace fresh and interesting.
At one point, it reveals itself: this is jazz—this is jazz in every which way. The concepts are jazzy, the emotions have as much free rein as a Miles Davis solo, and the musicological contours are as unfathomably tessellated as a Thelonious Monk solo. Only it’s also folk, so even this moment that makes sense of the record is somewhat amiss.
In short, there are simply too many spices in the pot to produce an album that you’ll be sampling for thousands of lunches to come. However, when you want to test your palette, Segal will be there, deranged, dissonant, and dazzling, all in one maddening and magical mix, that, by turns, calls you to proclaim that we don’t have enough of this sort of thing in modern music, only to stub your toe on a moment in the next song and announce in the same breath that we perhaps don’t need too much more either.
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