Ty Segall

Cali garage rock supremo adds synths and goes with the flow.

At various points in the past decade, Ty Segall’s extreme productivity has threatened to overshadow his musical excellence, so that even his best work – such as 2018’s Freedom’s Goblin – could be obscured by the two other albums he made that year. This 13th solo set, however, is his first in two years, a previously unimaginable hiatus. 2019’s First Taste reconfigured Segall’s molten garage rock in a novel way – no guitars were involved – and while Harmonizer isn’t quite so conceptual, the axe fuzz here is augmented by some powerfully overdriven synths (Cooper Crain, of kosmische heads Bitchin Bajas, co-produces). Aligned to blocky, modal tunes and robot-stomp rhythms, the overall sound is surprisingly close to Queens Of The Stone Age: check the Homme-like falsetto harmonies on Whisper, too. A big-sounding record, it feels like a step forward for Segall (Pictures is massive), even as Ride reconfigures his age-old debt to Syd Barrett.