Tulip Frenzy

The long-awaited release (well, we’ve been waiting for it since at least last week) of Hair, the collaboration between garage rock tyro Ty Segall and Darker My Love frontman Tim Presley (under the official authorship of “Ty Segall & White Fence”) is finally out, and it is like one of those madcap mashups straight from Ben and Jerry’s lab.  Imagine the tasty concoction created when Alex Chilton’s Like Flies On Sherbet is melted by Ivan Julian and Capsula’s The Naked Flame.  But not even that description prepares you for the gooey pleasures within!

See here, Tulip Frenzy declared Darker My Love’s Alive As You Are Numero Uno on our Top Ten List for 2010, and nothing that we’ve subsequently discovered from that year makes us qualify our drooling enthusiasm.  It was a perfect album, which is just as rare as a perfect game in baseball, and maybe even more pleasurable because you can play it over and over and over, as we continue to do.  Throughout 2011 we were waiting for the great follow up to that odd country rock masterpiece, and somehow it eluded our ace intelligence squad that Presley — who’s been in bands as disparate as The Fall and the Nerve Agents — had reconstituted hisself — with or without benefit of side persons, we do not know — as White Fence.

All we know is even last week we were spotting the flaw in young Ty Segall’s go-it-alone approach, and it’s that one-man studio bands don’t swing, as even the most rhythmically nimble need other live human beans to bounce off of.  And of course hearing the ruckus created by Segall’n’Presley on Hair, it’s clear that just walking into the studio together got these young’uns to throw their very hearts and souls against all four walls, no doubt to their neighbors’ consternation.  Does not play well with others is one of those black marks on a child’s life, but if anyone doubted what young Ty could amount to, just listen to this.  The squish of the fruit from his labor with the more experienced Mr. Presley is sonically fine,  more fun than a barrel of Fleshtones, taking the crunching guitar work Presley’s delivered in his previous incarnation and smashing it down upon Segall’s Brendan Benson pop inclinations, like what the Raconteurs would have sounded like had Jack White been into the Byrds and psychedelic drugs, not Zep and Delta blues.

Speaking of which: In a just world, there would be a few crazed bloggers today writing enthusiastic nonsense about Jack White’s solo album, while the mainstream media treated Hair like it was the release of Blonde On Blonde or Tommy or something.  Alas, things don’t quite work that way.  But if you want an early listen to the funnest collaboration since Quentin Tarantino sat down with Robert Rodriguez and mapped out Grindhouse go buy Hair!  And stay tuned for the summer tour of Ty Segall with a — wait for it — actual band.

This entry was posted on April 24, 2012 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Music with tags Drarker My Love, Hair, Tim Presley, Ty Segall & White Fence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.