This has been floating around for a while - and it's true, after my incessant writing about Ty Segall for a couple years, I have been detoxing over the past twelve months - but I bit the bullet and bought Emotional Mugger today. He cuts a more garage rawk trail than his even more prolific buddy John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees), much more likely to blow the speakers than take you into the hyper ether, but he is no less adventurous here. Each song seems to be its own entity, intent to max out the red on every speaker known to humanity, flirting with all of his predilections (glam rock, garage rock, stoner rock, 70s metal, 60s psych) while skewing it all so much to ensure each morsel leaves a tingling sensation to the mouth and an acidic itch in the back of the nose. You gotta hand it to the man, that even when songs seem less focused on pristine songs to stand the test of time, and to develop earworms likely to burrow into your head and eat you from the inside out. That white-noise synth a la Digital Leather; the guttural heaviness, laser effects and 60s pop vocal stylings of 'Diversion'; the cramped horror glam of 'Big Baby Man (I Want A Mommy) - it is all deliberately off the wall and diseased. It isn't really subversive though - Segall knows it's a joke and his self-awareness is passed on to us, we are to be in on the joke - but instead is a macabre noise trip with indelible hooks and a brooding closer in 'The Magazine' that I have incessantly played since stumbling across it - like if TV On The Radio listened to Disappears, then had a hallucinogenic breakdown. Emotional Mugger is a schizophrenic record, but with so many crazy ideas hitting the mark - how the fuck does he do it? Grab it through Drag City here. Ty Segall is bringing his Muggers to London in June, with Aussie synth punk miscreants Ausmuteants in tow - get tickets here, it will be all kinds of awesome.
