With fans having grown accustomed to Ty Segall cranking out pretty much an album a year since his eponymous debut in 2018, the 2-year gap since 2019’s ‘First Taste’ probably felt like an eternity. That’s largely true of most of the last two years, to be fair, with life having been pretty much on hold around the globe. It’s like 2020 and most of 2021 simply didn’t happen.
So to land ‘Harmonizer’ – again recorded with The Freedom Band – without warning feels like quite a strong hit, and it’s an indication off his – and the label’s – confidence in his fanbase.
Veering between electropop and full-on riffy hard rock via math and prog (‘Whisper’ packs pretty much the whole lot into three-and-a-half minutes), and ‘Erased’ blasts off somewhere between Hawkwind and The Melvins.
It’s certainly a far cry from the loose, slackerist indie of earlier releases like ‘Goodbye Bread’ and ‘Hair’: in fact, this is incredibly tight and meaty overall, and ‘Harmonizer’ is, ultimately, ‘Harmonizer’ is a rock album. ‘Ride’ may trail some charmingly psychedelic whimsy, and ‘Feeling Good’ is an uptempo new-wave/indie crossover thrashabout, while ‘Changing Contours’ is some noodly electro that gets a shade indulgent, especially in its Bowie vocal stylings, but ‘Wamxan’ is a full-on balls-out riffbeast of a tune, while ‘Play’ goes all Muse. It’s not the album’s best track by some margin, but is a measure of just how big the scope and sound of ‘Harmonizer’ is.
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