Words by Brandon Goei
originally posted March 24, 2011 at fnewsmagazine.com
Photo by Annabel Mehran
It’s rumored that when Carlos Santana played Woodstock in 1969, he was so deep into a mescal trip his guitar transformed into a giant snake onstage. He believed that he had to tame the wild nature of his axe to churn out the soaring solos that are now the trademark of his career.
I’d like to think Ty Segall is struck with the opposite circumstance. Not that Segall was about to turn into a snake onstage, but it was clear that he was the kicking, screaming tempest whose power his guitar had to harness into coherency.
In front of a sold-out crowd at the Empty Bottle on March 14th, Segall launched into song after song, linking crunchy distortion with yowling choruses. Every blazing solo and each seething verse had the hum of erratic energy behind it. And though everyone in the audience was shoulder-to-shoulder and swimming in a sea of other peoples’ expended breath, the tension in the room was non-existent; everyone was too engrossed in the musical moment.
Onstage, Segall was accompanied by three other bandmates, whose presence was best described as a swaggering mass of mop-headed hipsters once the music started. Each song launched with a sizable bang and a steady rhythm, but from there it seemed that the mission of the show was to steadily spiral out of control and into blissful oblivion.
It became apparent that the songs were more and more fractured the further into the set they were with later pieces often including progressive time signatures and shape-shifting timbres. The band demonstrated their ability to create a dynamic atmosphere, ranging from loud to weird and everything in between.
The loudness and weirdness was all for the better—any restless energy that was present, both onstage and in the crowd, was immediately released into the Monday night air, and what ensued was a celebration of all things fuzzy, raucous and cathartic about music.