Monolith Cocktail Blog

LP Review: Words: Gianluigi Marsibilio 

Ty Segall & White Fence ‘Joy’ (Drag City)

Disorder and progress. Joy is an album that embraces Ty Segall‘s psychedelia and White Fence’s potency within the enhanced framework of short and hard tracks. Songs that seem to test a space rocket, launch tests on a poetic platform, finding a peak of fleeting delirium.

Intentions are fully understood in songs such as ‘Body Behavior’, or, where those contrasts emerge between the song form and the small textual pearls that are drawn.

The storytelling of this work is strongly linked to productions like DRINKS or the Body/Head. The structure and thoughts of these pieces is inspired by bands like Palberta, which in the abstract research and in the fast songs, enhance their skills.

“Everyone makes grammar mistake”, Joy wants to wallow in these mistakes: teasingly. In a song that repeats ‘Hey Joel, where are you going with that?’ Hendrix takes over to play on the supposed death of rock.

The most concrete and poetic text of the album is in ‘A Nod’, where Segall sings: “Tried to please my mother/Tried to please my father/Tried to please everyone but me”, “My friends say I need money/My friends say I need followers/But I want to believe in me”.

The half-formed songs are an example of the continuous artistic flow of Ty Segall and Fence, who manage to remain attached to their creative activity with absolute incisiveness. Joy is a modus operandi of work and attitude to admire.

The use of pitch shifting and numerous slogans such as ‘Body Behavior’ or ‘Please Do Not Leave This Town’ leave a sense of the cyclonic and joyful: as in an eternal ride on a roller coaster.

In Joy, things come together and resume the thread of Hair, their first album collaborative album together, released in 2012. After a feast of a garage rock that still embellishes your session of listening, the closure of ‘My Friend’ is quite useless for the purpose of the album, but still remains a ballad slightly dreamy, pleasant to listen to.

A daring record for an expert and ready duo, an album made with craft and lo-fi attitude, a test that we cannot disdain and that exalts a historical collaboration.

Gianluigi Marsibilio