California’s noisy, ever-changing adventurer crafts a double al;bum consolidation of his sounds…

To date, the records of Ty Segall have darted around as if in open defiance of the importance of the definitive statement. The cherubic Californian, 27 years old this year, evidently sees virtue in covering a lot of ground, and quick. From the sun-baked songcraft of 2011’s Goodbye Bread to the Satanic Hawkwind space-rock of the Ty Segall Band’s 2012 LP Slaughterhouse to the depressive acoustic balladry of last year’s Sleeper – no two of his releases feel quite the same in either sound, influence, or vibe. You might well question the wisdom of this approach, but it’s hard to deny that Ty’s quicksilver muse is a good fit for his abundant work rate. Even if you’ve picked up the lion’s share of his albums to date, you still don’t yet feel like you won’t have space for another.

Manipulator might be the point when all this changes. Ty’s seventh solo album in seven years, it’s a double LP and 17 tracks long, clocking in just shy of an hour. It’s an album that feels quintessentially – perhaps definitively – Ty, touching on aspects of all his previous records: the volatile fuzz guitar, the gleefully villainous beat group pop, the noble string orchestration, the sweetly sardonic lyricism. But in contravention of the familiar rules of the double LP, Manipulator is neither a sprawling and chaotic thing, nor constructed along boldly conceptual lines. No song here exceeds the five-minute mark, and each one feels finely honed, melodically generous, and designed to penetrate your consciousness.

As ever, Ty’s music feels wise to rock history, but wickedly playful in the manner he chooses to use it; he’s not so much out to exhume corpses as make them stand up and dance. On Manipulator, Arthur Lee’s Love is an evident touchstone – most notably on “The Clock”, with its spry, flamenco-like guitar runs and genteel swoons of violin. “Feel” channels the beefier end of Nuggets garage, the likes of The Chocolate Watch Band and The Mystery Trend, with visionary-paranoid lyrics (“Feel the creeps in the sky/Let them live in each other’s eyes”) and a heroic percussion breakdown that tips back into a sea of fuzz. Strings get another outing on the glorious “The Singer”, a falsetto-flirting waltz reminiscent of the more Lennon-tinged material from last year’s Sleeper, but with a decidedly sprightlier footing.

But whereas Sleeper found Ty exploring his acoustic side, Manipulator is every inch an electric record, and we often find its diverse styles are often merely a rocky atoll from which Ty can trigger a variety of extravagant guitar detonations. The glammy Bolan shimmy of “Tall Man Skinny Lady” would be a perfectly loveable song in its own right, even before it’s caked in burnt-amp fuzz, squalls of top-of-the-fretboard shred, and a fade-out in which we hear dead strings thrashed without mercy. A careful mix ensures that the songs themselves keep their integrity even during such roughhouse treatment – although live, of course, we can fully expect them to fry like bacon.

As a symbol of Manipulator’s consistency, much of its goodies crop up towards the tail end. The febrile hippy balladry of “Don’t You Want To Know? (Sue)” ushers you gently towards the vitriolic Fuzz War churn of “The Crawler”. Here, too, there’s space for Ty’s introspective side to fan out, as on “The Feels”. “And when I look into your eyes/I realise/You’re the same as me/You’ll never be free,” he sings. A sobering thought: if a figure as flighty as Ty Segall feels chained down, what hope is there for the rest of us?

So it’s over to the growing cohort of Ty aficionados to quibble over whether Manipulator is their hero’s definitive statement to date. It lacks, for instance, the sustained punk-rock dementia of Slaughterhouse, or the thematic fullness of Goodbye Bread, with its visions of Californian paradise gone rotten on the vine. But to consider it from another direction: are we going to turn our noses up at a record that comes on, in its spirited catchiness and daring scope, like the Greatest Hits of Ty Segall? No, we’re not.

Louis Pattison

Q&A

Your records often focus in on one particular area. But Manipulator feels broad, all-encompassing.

I definitely wanted to make a record that had a little bit of every sound I have worked with in the past, and hopefully to expand on these sounds. It was wild to do, and it definitely only really glued together fully in the studio. I wanted to go as far down the writing rabbit hole that I could go…

Your records sometimes feel like they pick up from unfinished moments in pop history – that weird space between folk, glam and psych in that period of Rex and Bowie…

These are huge influences of mine… I definitely like pulling sounds from things I like and putting them in different places or contexts and seeing how they exist in that place, and that was a definite thing we went for. Like, glam drums in a punk song.

The guitar sounds on Manipulator are particularly hot. What’s the secret?

[Engineer] Chris Woodhouse, my amp and the ol’ Fuzz War pedal. But if I told you the secret I would have to kill you.

INTERVIEW BY LOUIS PATTISON

Five CD, 91 track bonanza from reggae’s golden age…

In February 1978 the Punky Reggae Party that Bob Marley would shortly celebrate in song was just getting going. To help fuel it came a mission to Jamaica comprised of several London faces; Sex Pistols’ frontman John Lydon, DJ and film maker Don Letts, photographer Dennis Morris and journalist Vivien Goldman, a quartet met at Kingston airport by Virgin boss Richard Branson in a vintage Rolls Royce to carry them to the Sheraton hotel, where Branson had booked an entire floor. The mission statement was simple; to sign up as much of the island’s musical talent as possible. For the next fortnight the Sheraton was besieged by singers and players eager for a contract.

Such was the birth of Virgin’s Front Line label, launched that summer with a torrent of albums by some of reggae’s finest acts; harmony trios like Culture, The Mighty Diamonds and The Gladiators, ‘toasters’ like U Roy, I Roy, Tapper Zukie and Prince Far I, and singers like Gregory Isaacs and Johnny Clarke, augmented by UK acts like Linton Johnson and Delroy Washington.

To gather so much talent was an astonishing coup, and to market it with a pizazz reserved for rock and soul acts almost as remarkable (although Island records had already overseen the ascent of Bob Marley to superstardom). The Front Line logo of a hand clenching barbed wire was a debatable calling card – the music was more often about the spiritual aspirations of Rasta or plain old romance than political struggle – but punk and reggae shared a mood of fevered, exhilarating revolution.

The five CDs here do a commendable job of sampling what Branson’s sack of cash purchased, while the accompanying booklet includes evocative photos, press clips, capsule profiles of the acts and a funny, gracious foreword from Lydon: “It was all so inspiring. I loved it and Jamaica became part of me”.

The sheer profusion of names that were signed meant an inevitably uneven quality. Amo the most enduring tracks are those by The Gladiators, who, like others, recut old hits anew that gained in clarity and force from the originals. “Looks Is Deceiving” and “Chatty Chatty Mouth” remain tough expressions of Rasta righteousness, tinged with mystery and the millennial mood of the era when the “Two Sevens Clash” (ie1977) as Culture put it. That particular track isn’t here, but the latter trio’s anthem “Natty Never Get Weary” is still brightly engaging. The brilliance and purity of the singing on display here is often breathtaking. Jamaica had inherited its vocal tastes from the likes of Marvin Gaye and harmony groups like The Impressions, and the island became the repository of the ‘soul’ tradition. The languid tones of Gregory ‘Cool Ruler’ Isaacs are emblematic – his “Let’s Dance” and “Soon Forward” are here – but the falsetto of Johnny Clarke is similarly seductive, and the purity and agility of Norman Grant, lead voice with The Twinkle Brothers was effective whether on a love call like “Don’t Want To Be Lonely” or a militant side like “Africa”.

At the other end of the vocal scale is the concrete mixer delivery of Prince Far I, one of several ‘talk-over’ DJs present. More expressive than Far I are U Roy, the pioneer of the style, and Big Youth, whose “The Upful One” lives up to its title, and the idiosyncratic Tapper Zukie, whose “She Want A Phensic” is a barbed sexual jibe. Rapping before hip-hop made its appearance, the ‘DJs’ were true traiblazers.

Rastafari’s utopian vision of Africa was often fanciful and came mixed up with biblical prophecy, but reggae’s championship of the stuggle against apartheid in South Africa was unflagging – see The Abyssinians’ “South Africa Enlistment” or Zukie’s “Tribute To Steve Biko”.

Not everything on Front Line was rightous and rootsical. The label’s biggest hit was “Uptown Top Ranking” by Althea and Donna, two uptown girls on a lark, who have a couple of likewise lightweight cuts here. Amid a sprinkling of single selections in the mix a stand-out is the smoky “Cairo” by Joyella Blade, combining passionate vocals with early synth; another in a boxful of great voices.
Neil Spencer

Q&A
DON LETTS
What was your role on that trip?
To lend moral support, because at home John was Public Enemy Number One. It was an escape from the media frenzy. Contrary to the ‘Roxy Club DJ turned white people onto reggae’ line, John already knew the music. I had never been to Jamaica. It remains the most remarkable journey of my life.

In what way?
Meeting people who were mythic, romanticised names, and finding they were people begging us for food and drink. John and I went on forays round the island, to U Roy’s sound system for example, where we got so blitzed we crashed through the whole event. Or going to Lee Perry’s studio and watching him record “Holidays In The Sun” and ”Belsen Was A Gas’ – those tapes exist somewhere!

Any other encounters?
Meeting Tapper Zukie in Reema, a dangerous area. When John asked ‘Where all these guns then?’ his posse pulled them out. It was election time, and we were told, ’Don’t hire a green or red car’ – don’t show allegaiance. Also through the late Dicky Jobson we visited Joni Mitchell, who had a house there, and she played us some music which John asked her to take off. ’What is that shit? ‘Oh That’s my latest album’- the first time I saw John turm red.

What about the music you brought back?
It’s very special, the last golden moments of roots reggae.

Any favourites?
I can’t separete them, roots and rudie. People say Jamaica is double-edged, for some a paradise, for others a pair of dice. What reggae got
from it was exposure, and it went on to colonise the planet.
INTERVIEW: NEIL SPENCER