#5 Album of 2010: Melted by Ty Segall

Ty Segall knows how to melt your face. He has perfected the formula for doing so: hyperinfectious, in-and-out garage-psych jams.

The product is Melted, Ty's third release in 18 months. Although the man is highly prolific, how surprising is this? There's really not much complexity to what he does: the songs, on the surface, sound like they could have been written in 10 minutes. But who's to say that good music has to be deep, complex, and rich in meaning? This album's sole purpose is to kick ass, and I love it for that.

Now I mentioned the term "garage" a little earlier, and I want to make this clear: this album doesn't suffer from repetition, a terminal illness that so many garage-rock LPs fall victim to. There is an undeniable air of similarity between each song, but each track on Melted takes on a life of its own and has its own distinct identity. It's impossible, for example, to mistake the crunchy sludge of "Finger" with the happy-go-lucky stomp "Caesar" that follows it, or to mix up the pseudo-blues of "Mrs." with the British Invasion textures of "My Sunshine". The album is carefully constructed to equalize the energetic with the laid-back, allowing the minute versatility to shine in the background while Ty frenetically pumps out hook after hook in the foreground.

This album's not afraid to get weird, either. The majority of lo-fi rock tends to be straightforward and recorded on the worst equipment imaginable to create that bedroom aesthetic, without frills or anything of the like. There is a surprising amount of experimentation to be found on this album. The end of "Bees" goes from steady to highly volatile in the span of two seconds, in which pitch and speed are distorted into a clattering mess of a climax that somehow returns to its ground state in the final seconds. There is a flute outro on "Caesar", an uncharacteristically brooding intro on "Imaginary Person" and creepy vocalizations thrown in "Girlfriend" and "Alone" for good measure. All of this gives you something to sink your teeth into after each listen. This is a little bit more than the straight-up rock and roll of yesteryear.

Melted isn't a masterpiece. It's not intended to be. Instead, it chooses to be a hell of a good ride, and an innovative one at that.

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