Double Review: Ty Segall's Manipulator and White Fence's For the Recently Found Innocent

Back in 2014, I wrote about a dozen album reviews for a website called Buzz and Howl, which was subsequently hacked and disappeared into the ether. This double review of related records is part of a series of posts intended to preserve that work, unedited. 

Ty Segall, Manipulator 

Much like the album he recently produced for his pal Tim Presley (White Fence’s For the Recently Found Innocent), Ty Segall’s Manipulator seems like a conscious attempt at making a bigger, bolder statement than his previous records. Segall has always seemed perfectly content to dash off ten or twelve songs in a particular mood or style. Last year saw the mostly acoustic Sleeper, while 2012’s three full-length releases each depicted a particular mode--fun retro times in the studio with a like-minded buddy on the White Fence collaboration Hair, balls-out fuzz with his touring band on Slaughterhouse, and the self-described “Satan in space” vibe of Twins. But Manipulator is something different: a double-album chocked full with seventeen tracks that display the full stylistic spectrum of Segall’s talents.

The track that immediately jumped out at me upon first listening to the album, as can sometimes happen, is the one that sounds least similar to the rest. Although it begins with the drums and then slowly introduces the rest of the instruments--a device Segall uses perhaps too often-- “Mister Main” relies on a groove-y bassline to carry it. The guitar, in opposition to the riffin’ and shreddin’ Segall typically employs, is mostly content to match that bass groove, until, at just under the two-minute mark (and right after the vocals have pushed from the already high register of the body of the song into a true falsetto) a strangely wimpy and experimental guitar solo begins, and then continues through the final chorus to the end of the track. Most of Segall’s solos hit like a ton of bricks dropped on your head, but this one is more like having a brick scraped slowly across your face, letting you feel its weight and grit right up close and personal, and is incredibly effective for that.

Segall has often been called a “psych-” or “garage-rocker,” but his largest debt is to the early 70s proto-metal of bands like Hawkwind, Blue Cheer, and the grandaddy of them all, Black Sabbath. That heavy blues stomp from before metal was codified and then split into a thousand sub-genres. A track like “Feel” reveals these influences very clearly. It’s over four minutes of pure guitar shreddage, only interrupted by a forty-second long drum solo. And when was the last time you heard an actual, hand-to-God, drum solo in a contemporary rock n roll song?

Other songs that stand out for their introduction of sonic elements beyond the typical guitar-bass-drums arrangement are “The Clock,” with its tastefully non-melodramatic string section, the title and opening track’s three-chord organ riff, and “The Hand,” one of several tracks to employ an acoustic guitar in its driving glam-mode, rather than as the quiet, soft instrument you might expect. “Don’t You Want To Know (Sue)” starts out acoustic in that quiet, soft way, and could be a Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan demo for the first forty-five seconds, before shifting into something a little more rockin’. But it also shows that Segall was thinking of Manipulator as an “album,” if not quite a concept album, coming as it does on the heels of a song called “Susie Thumb.” In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Segall mentioned that he had the sequencing ready before going into the studio to actually track the record, and small moments like this carry us through what could be an exhausting hour of rock n roll. Manipulator is not my favorite Ty Segall album thus far, but in the forethought that went into its writing and construction, and the meticulousness of its production, it is certainly a step forward in his artistry. I have a feeling that the greatest of Ty Segall albums is still yet to come.





White Fence, For the Recently Found Innocent

White Fence’s Tim Presley seems to be making a conscious effort at getting out of the home-recording ghetto and into the world on his latest release, For the Recently Found Innocent. It’s the first album under the White Fence moniker to have a producer and be recorded in a studio--even if that producer is fellow psych-revivalist Ty Segall and that studio is Segall’s garage, equipped with an 8-track tape machine. So it’s not as if Presley has abandoned his scene and made a million-dollar major label album (although Drag City, who put out this album, is certainly a label with a higher profile than Woodsist, who put out the previous ones).

Perhaps he turned to Segall after, as he told SPIN, the first attempts at the songs “didn’t move me in the same way other home recordings did. I knew they were good but they just weren’t working for me in that capacity.” Or maybe he just had so much fun making 2012’s let-it-all-hang-out collabo Hair with Segall that he couldn’t wait to work with him again. Either way, with Segall’s retro-pop sensibility influencing Presley from behind the boards, and Thee Oh Sees drummer Nick Murray sitting behind the kit, For the Recently Found Innocent is a definitive new beginning, a new plateau reached in White Fence’s recorded output.

The first, pseudo-title, track is a one-minute fragment that seems to abruptly dissipate to make room for the album to start on a more upbeat note with, “Anger! Who Keeps You Under?” Whether this abrupt transition is a statement or not is hard to know. On the one hand, it could be saying, “cut this, the rest of the record’s gonna be a lot more worked-out and worked-up.” But on the other hand, it doesn’t sound all that dissimilar from how any other White Fence album has begun. By track three, though, we’re definitely in well-crafted pop territory. With “Like That,” the creative team seems to have aimed for Syd Barrett and landed on the Lilys--which is no way a bad thing. Following this is “Sandra (When the Earth Dies),” which captures some of that slightly woozy, carnivalesque atmosphere of White Fence’s home-recorded masterpieces, delivering lines like, “All the junkies left to cry all the junkies wave goodbye laugh and cry […] when the earth dies we’ll wish we died” to a jaunty organ tune. Other standouts are “Wolf Gets Red-Faced,” which is excellently, patiently arranged and paced, and “Afraid of What It’s Worth.” The latter track hits that sweet spot where Brian Jonestown Massacre sounded like they could’ve maybe been recording in the 80s, and is also one of the few White Fence tracks that makes you go, “Oh yeah, Tim Presley is the guy from Darker My Love.”

For the Recently Found Innocent is the first White Fence record that I would recommend to people outside of the cult of four-tracker weirdos. Any psych-pop enthusiast would dig it, and certainly any Ty Segall fan made curious by Hair could jump on board here and be well-satisfied. Tim Presley has managed to grow while still making a record that sits in perfect comfort on the shelf beside all the previous White Fence releases. Well done.