by Gianluigi Marsibilio (@gmarsibilio)
The grace of experimenting with lightness and a unique ability: Ty Segall is a laboratory, an inexhaustible forge of projects and collaborations. After an incredible live album, First Taste is a beautiful statement in which there is space for more conceptual and sophisticated songs, such as "Self Esteem" or "Whatever".
Segall loves "lose the name of action" and playing on unconventional territories that marry with absurdly distant influences: from the percussive art that seems to be taken from Led Zeppelin's pieces to the atmospheres that recall the Italian horror of Fulci or Dario Argento. The sounds are the jubilation of chaos, a necessary and functional condition that occurred thanks to the partial farewell to his Telecaster.
The space in the disc is created by the entrance of instruments like the bouzouki or the keyboards that make the atmosphere more unusual and particular for an artist who has made psychedelia a mantra. The walls of the sound are as distorted as the perceptions in a story by Aldous Huxley and create different stories that seem, however, among the strings and ideas of Segall, absolutely natural.
The anatomy of distortion in 19 albums (also linked to the many satellite projects); understanding and appreciating the genesis of the sounds of this album means entering Segall's "creative moment". I don't know if you've ever read David Lynch's description of "Bob's Big Boy" cafeteria: "You can have a coffee or a milkshake. Gathering you in shady dark corners and always returning to the safe light of the diner" but it is this mixture of security and defeat that is provoked by every corner of First Taste.
A record is a place where you can find fragmented ideas, this time combining in a completely different way, with a different language than the usual guitar psychedelia. The melodies are splashed and complex scaffolding, certainly a new unicum for Segall's career. First Taste represents the meaning and exaltation of a counterculture that fights against itself. Segall proves to be an artist fighting a lonely war and likes to question himself in dialogue with chaos.
Ty Segall has the punctual soul of Leonard Cohen and the shakiness of Hunter Thompson, a crasis of the '60s and '70s projected into a chaotic soup that tastes like entropy, big crunch but above all the gigantic creativity of an artist who has no time.