Bouzouki Joe

“My number one rule on this record was ‘no guitars.’ I still wanted it to be a crazy rock album, but the rock couldn’t come from guitars. To me, it was an interesting challenge: Could we still rock as hard as ever without guitars?” TY SEGALL talks bouzoukis, kotos, Omnichords and First Taste.

- Joe Bosso

SINCE HE BEGAN ISSUING RECORDS in 2008, Ty Segall has pretty much staked out his territory as the prime mover of lo-fi West Coast garage rock. At almost yearly intervals, he’s released a steady stream of albums steeped in spacy psychedelia, proto-punk, T. Rex-style glam, early British metal and Seventies Midwest power-pop that all share two common traits: boatloads of freakishly infectious hooks and walls of gnarly, fuzz-driven guitars.

Throughout most of his career, the singer-songwriter and self-taught multi-instrumentalist recorded his albums on his own, but starting with his eponymous 2017 release (the second such time he’s titled a record Ty Segall), he began opening things up by inviting members of what he calls the Freedom Band (guitarist Emmett Kelly, drummer Charles Moothart, keyboardist Ben Boyce, and utility player Mikal Cronin) to join him in the studio. Segall employs the group on his newest disc, First Taste, and the results bear all the markings of his previous outings — songs such as “Taste,” “The Fall” and “Lone Cowboys” are chock full of ear-candy melodies and brutish, overdriven sonic force.

But the new album holds one important distinction: Neither Segall nor Kelly plays a single note on the guitar. Kelly is the de facto bassman on the record, while Segall channels his inner Bryan Jones, playing a wide variety of instruments including koto, bouzouki, and Omnichord. According to Segall, such experimentation wasn’t the result of random spontaneity; rather, he and Kelly were adhering to a hard-and-fast dictum set forth at the outset of recording.