Ty Segall: Ty Segall review – gnarly, gratifying garage rock star

Ty Segall is suitably prolific for a garage rockstar – he has put out a solo album almost every year for the past decade, not to mention a raft of collaborations. Also in keeping with the unselfconsciousness of his chosen genre is the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been much progression: this Ty Segall, his second self-titled album, pedals back from the raucousness and heavy distortion of his last record proper, Emotional Mugger, and resumes the peppy but still relatively gnarly sound of 2014’s Manipulator. It’s a zany but melodically substantial record, in which the best songs (Thank You Mr K, Freedom) sit somewhere between the oeuvres of the Lemonheads and the Ramones. In 2015, Segall also released an album of scratchy and slightly unhinged T Rex covers, and that glam fandom surfaces on the thick riffs and stomping beat of Break a Guitar. This is by no means zeitgeisty music, but it’s gratifying even so.