With “Wave Goodbye” it's almost time to stop calling what Ty Segall is doing “garage rock”. At this point, he's turned up the volume so much, and created so much distortion, that we aren't in the referential territory of Syd Barrett and Sky Saxon, as we are with White Fence, nor are we even really in the same arena as the Yardbirds in Blow Up. If there are any major groups that Ty Segall has decided he wants to reference in “Wave Goodbye” it's Black Motherfucking Sabbath.
At this point it's probably appropriate to note that this sound is not the case for all of Segall's projects, but only the Ty Segall Band, which is releasing a new album on In the Red in June called Slaughterhouse. The band features Mikal Cronin, Emily Rose Epstein, and Charlie Mootheart, and they sound almost nothing like, say, the new White Fence/Ty Segall collaboration Hair. But this is a good thing. If Ty wants to put a new band together every single time he wants to explore a new aspect of the heavy rock sonicsphere, I'm not going to argue with him. And I'm excited for this new record; louder and harder and whinier is not a bad idea, ever.
