(Drag City)
Garage rock made with saxophone, mandolin, Japanese koto and bouzouki? Most garage-inclined albums, even those of the psychedelic persuasion, don’t often leave the traditional band configuration. First Taste – which might be Ty Segall’s 12th solo studio album (it depends how you’re counting) – adds a music shop’s worth of exotic instrumentation and double drummers to this Californian’s driving, sprawling oeuvre.
Magnificently, songs like Taste or The Fall are only energised by these diverse sonic signatures. The double-drummers are key, too: Segall’s in the left-hand channel, while frequent collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Charles Moothart is in the right. Tracks such as I Worship the Dog (dogs are a recurrent theme in Segall’s work) simultaneously peddle protean sludge, ticklish percussiveness and heady drones. The skronk is fabulously full-on, but Segall’s Beatles fixation comes to the fore on sweeter-natured swirls like When I Met My Parents (Part 3) or Ice Plant, lightening the assault but not sparing the senses.
