POSSESSION

2025: YOLO. With the quickness, time's still
slipping into the future-so fast at times,
you may think the end's in sight up ahead,
or that you've outrun the long trail of history
behind. All that's absurd, man. Take it from
Ty Segall. He's been on a few trips around
the sun himself, making records in orbit as he
charts his path forward. Modern life is here to
stay, but also (to quote an old civil war scribe),
everything rocks and nothing dies-so for
Possession, Ty's 16th album, he strikes up the
orchestra in his head with an abiding view
of some quintessentially American stories, a
quest channeled into ten non-stop bangers.
Because you gotta move-or something
might be catching you!
A year and a half removed from the
trenchant identity opus of his Three Bells
song cycle, Ty's beamed himself out from
deep within psychic interiors. Hitting the
trail beneath the big skies of our good
ol' frontier empire, he's on the hunt for
new horizons-and it's frankly astonishing to hear, at this mature point in his
discography, the discovery of invigorated new sonics around every bend. That's
simply what Ty does with his music. Here, compulsive rhythm arrangements are
joined in battle by sweeping movements of strings and horns that further the
charge righteously.
Be it de Toqueville, duBois, George H. Nash, Howard Zinn, Bob Dylan or
Smile-era Beach Boys, it doesn't matter where you get your history: whether
you wanna party like it's 1999 or 1699, the stories you like to tell yourself tend
to reinforce what you already believe. But what if they didn't' Here, coursing
through the irresistibly high music spirits, Ty foists social concepts that you won't
read about in school. In the process, he manages to slip discreetly in and out of
the ranks of silver-tongued bums, fly-by-nights and way-outs like Cheap Trick
and Steely Dan, never tarrying long enough to retain their distinctive ordure.
One of the keys to this new music involved tapping an old friend and collaborator, filmmaker Matt Yoka, to write with him. As a non-musician, Matt's
language sense is different from the one Ty's amassed as a player of music. With
the trust they've developed over the years-brainstorming the visual worlds of
Goodbye Bread, Manipulator, Emotional Mugger, and plenty more-they throw
the conceptual ball back and forth to translate general vibes and feels into wicked
lyric imagery, each acting as writer and editor in the process.
Through these lyric sets, Ty found new scansion and different shapes suggesting the qualities of the songs, and of an overall arrangement sense. That's
where the other keys came in-piano keys! Ty's been woodshedding on the
88s, the 76s and/or the 61s; they add new outlines and shadings to the music,
fortifying his fantastic plastic vision left and right. Rife with singing guitar leads
and Wizzardian brass n' reeds lustily riffin' on the banks of Ty's harmony vocal
choir, Possession features some of Ty's most inspired songs to date.
It's a post-"Paradise City" map of the American way, moving and grooving,
but not pointing fingers even as childish fantasies splatter across the windshield.
Taking back alleys through complicated cityscapes, ripping riffs jaggedly out of
past hits for a new purpose, Ty scans the wreckage scattered all around, singing
about the end of the rope while resisting defeat-suggesting an ec