Ty Segall’s 2016 Emotional Mugger Tour was a blistering assault of psychedelic surrealism. The power derived from the multiple-guitar, six person set-up of Mikal Cronin, King Tuff (Kyle Thomas), Emmett Kelly, and Wand’s Cory Hanson and Evan Burrows. The surrealism came in when Segall donned a baby’s mask, filtering his rock star persona through a shroud of carnivalesque disguise. When the band turned up at Mark Riley’s BBC recording studio, they had already logged 50 shows. It was mayhem — how could it not be? — but finely tuned.
This five song EP revisits the glorious abandon of that mid-teens iteration of Segall’s art. It delivers four songs from Emotional Mugger, plus a rabid but abbreviated run-through of…
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One minute and two seconds into The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’, there’s a vocal punctuation that sends music off on a whole new trajectory: the Fabs united, as a collective Little Richard, letting out an ecstatic “woo!” (or perhaps an “ooh!”: what do you hear?). It’s pop’s capacity for joy, energy, spontaneity and boundless possibilities articulated in a split second.
The seventeenth solo album by Ty Segall, prolific and sometimes frustrating Californian garage rocker, may not have quite the same cultural impact. But after three minutes and 13 seconds of Possession’s title track, Segall drops his very own “woo!” – an unconscious signal, perhaps, that this complicated rock classicist has hit on a more direct mode of expression.