A REVIEW:

SLAUGHTERHOUSE- TY SEGALL BAND (2012)

Death: A mystifyingly loud screech of guitars turned up to 11 introducing you to Ty Segall Band. You'd put this record on not expecting it to blow your speakers out mere nanoseconds after needle drops.* Ty and Mikal's vocal melodies are great on this track once it gets into the meat. There's a great Workaholics episode where Adam and Ders do a bunch of coke to this song and burn the American flag in the pursuit of making an unburnable flag. Crazy shit.

Death fades into I Bought My Eyes with more feedback, suddenly stopping to let the cleanest guitar on the record shine. Some of Ty's best vox. The "ooohh oohh ooohh" part is my favorite. Of course, the blast of fuzz comes back in to turn it into what we know and love from Ty Segall. I think I Bought My Eyes is one of the best songs in his discography. Charles and Ty playing a synchronized lead line finishes out the track. Thin Lizzy if Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson were two surf punks from Laguna Beach crushing dimed Music Mans with fuzz.

The title track boasts one of the coolest guitar parts on the whole record. Spastic-ly moving up the fretboard with Ty yelling, "I want a Slaughterhouse!" Ty screams like a maniac on Slaughterhouse. Not just the song, but the whole entire record. Slaughterhouse has his best screams though. Short and loud, ending with Ty sounding like a wild banshee. Definitely shows more of Ty Segall Band's punk side. 

The Tongue keeps up the franticness of the first half of the record. Not much else to say about this one to be honest. It's a pretty rowdy song. Some of the others outshine it, but I think it has it's place on the album.

Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart was, from my inference, mostly written by Charles. The intro riff reminds me of some of the stuff off Fuzz I. Essentially a precursor for what was to come with Fuzz. My favorite part is around 2 minutes and 25 seconds. Everything besides Ty's vocal and a guitar drop out. It's a major change of pace. Everything slows down for a second before a fuzzy explosion picks up the tempo.

Speaking of tempo changes, Wave Goodbye is by far the heaviest track on the record. My favorite Ty Segall song of all time. Mikal plays a slow chromatic bass line interrupted by the squeal of Charles and Ty's guitars. I love when Ty gets super heavy. It's thick, but not tight. It's a loose kind of heavy. Trashy and spitty. The lyrics of Wave Goodbye are so rad. I think it's about someone's descent into sin. It wasn't a descent that was out of their hands, but an intentional one. They'd seen all the boring and mundane things they'd done and decided start causing trouble. I kind of realized that only after I started writing this review. That's one of the best parts about doing this; finding new shit about the songs you already love. "F**k yeah!"

I don't have much to say about Muscle Man. Probably the weakest track on the record. It's good but not great. Still decently cool.

I'm going to lump the two covers into one section. First is The Bag I'm In by The Fabs. Ty and his band's rendition is pure noise. A testament to the progression of garage bands. The Fabs version is honestly better, but both are rad. I wish that they'd added the organ part into the Slaughterhouse version. Listen to both and let me know what you think, prepare your ears for the noise in Ty's rendition. Next is Diddy Wah Diddy by Bo Diddley, likely partly inspired by Captain Beefheart's version (which is f**king stellar by the way). It's a supped up version that puts the song in high gear and amps on 10. "Alright, here we go. Extra fast." I was going to call it a faithful rendition, but it's sort of faithless. Everything is on 110%. They basically abandoned the song half-way through, Ty claiming, "I don't know what we're doing."

Oh Mary is the only song on the record, besides the covers, that was not written by the whole band. Ty released Oh Mary on his self-titled in 2008 one-man-band style. The band's version fills out an already perfect garage song. Obviously, it sounds like a full band as opposed to one guy playing a hi-hat and a kick drum while singing and playing guitar. I can't decide between the two yet. They're both really great. I guess it depends what kind of mood I'm in. Do I want heavy and fast? Slaughterhouse version. Do I want junky garage? Self-titled version. I also dig when a band takes an old song and gives it a different spin. Not very many people do that anymore. I wish they would.

The final track is the band's love letter to the DIY pedal builders, Death By Audio. Fuzz War is 10 minutes of noise and feedback created by, from what I can gather, Death By Audio's famous Fuzz War pedal. Since the resurgence of garage bands in the early 2000s, the Fuzz War has made it's way into thousands of different garage records. The reason I started using one was because of Charles and Ty's band Fuzz. As much as I LOVE the DBA Fuzz War, the track Fuzz War is not my favorite. I can't lie, I don't want to listen to 10 minutes of noise at the end of a record. I have a feeling that the "song" was made purely to fill out the rest of the album. They probably could've written something to fill that space, but that's just what I would've done. Too late to change anything now I suppose.

All in all Slaughterhouse is a rad record. It's what got me into the rest of Ty's discography. Wave Goodbye was my anthem my senior year of high school. It inspired me to write heavy music. To chase their guitar tone. I'm not even sure how they got it to sound so HUGE. I have tried and failed many times to recreate the sound of the record. The liquid reverb that engulfs Ty's vocals, the gritty, grimey fuzz of the guitars, and the FAT bass tone. I'm going to make another attempt to do so tonight. I'll update you if I'm able to pull it off. I wish they'd written more with this lineup, but I guess we wouldn't have gotten Fuzz if Charles had used his riffs for Ty Segall Band. Unfortunately, the band came to an end in 2015 when Ty started The Muggers, so we'll never be able to see what else they would've done as a group. Mikal still plays in Ty's current touring band, Charles left last year to pursue his solo project and his band Primitive Ring. Emily hasn't been a part of Ty's crew in a while, but she's got her own band called Emily Rose and The Rounders.  Many of the tracks on the record have been staple parts of Ty's live set since the band dissolved. Wave Goodbye has been played at most of the stops on his most recent tour.

I'd also like to take a second to appreciate the album cover. Tatiana Kartomten did the album covers for Slaughterhouse and Fuzz I. Ty asked her to make the Slaughterhouse cover "an interstellar warrior that had his eyeballs ripped out of his head." There's a short Pitchfork article about the two album covers and her process. Worth a quick read. The cover is haunting and fitting of the music held within its sleeve. It's almost as if you can hear the screams of said interstellar warrior constantly throughout the album. It's clearly based on I Bought My Eyes, as is stated in the aforementioned article. His eyes were torn out leaving space in the sockets. Or maybe they were replaced with the cosmos? It's hard to decipher. I guess it's all up to interpretation.

Thanks for reading. Have a splendid Friday.

"Wave Goodbye. Bye, Bye!"

Cheers,

Jack

*I'd like to add and addendum to this part. It's kind of hard not to expect this record to destroy your speakers when you look at the cover. Or at the name. Or if you know of the reputation that precedes Ty Segall's name.