Ty Segall’s latest, Manipulator, clocks in at 56 minutes and took him about 14 months to make. It’s the first album he’s put out that was not rushed in any sense—in a recent interview with Jayson Greene at Pitchfork, Segall said “every other record I’ve done, I was like, ‘OK, we’ve got these 10 songs? Let’s do this.’ But this time, I wanted to have no time constraints… it was very interesting to go so far deep into a pile of songs.” Contrasting this tedium with the “emotional first-takes” and “grime” of his earlier releases, he goes on to say that “this record was about finding out how to become a perfectionist while holding onto that rawness.”
Indeed, Manipulator’s labor-intensive nature really shines through as one of its defining characteristics. Everything about the production is very deliberate, thought out and well executed—there are tastefully deployed string sections (no small feat in the rock realm), cleverly chosen vocal harmonies, freak-out moments that feel deserved and not jerk-offy. As far as “holding onto that rawness” is concerned, Manipulator falls short, but in distancing Segall (little by little, as did last year’s psych-folk Sleeper) from the garage-rock trend he rode in on, that shortcoming becomes one of the album’s successes. “The Singer”– with its string section, expansive arrangement, and precise vocal delivery—could almost be a Bowie track. The instrumental for “Mister Main” grooves like a stoned impression of The Meters, with Segall laying a McCartney-inflected vocal melody over the top.
Already we’re about 6,000 miles from the lo-fi roar of Segall’s earlier releases. But while the production is more refined and the genre less pigeonholed than in Segall’s earlier work, both of these tracks maintain the distractedly expressive lead guitar that has been part of Segall’s thing since the beginning. In addition, they show Segall continuing to form a personal style that has more longevity than a genre trend.
In this vein, Manipulator boasts some real gems. The second track, “Tall Man Skinny Lady”, is a solid song (in the sense that if you farted the melody it would still be good), it doesn’t fall neatly into any particular category of rock, and it’s handled perfectly. The combination of the acoustic rhythm guitar, the not-excessively-fuzzy lead guitar tone, and the absence of any element outside a rock quartet all work to highlight the content: the melody, the lead guitar freakout, the groove of it. The production is mostly understated, allowing the song to speak for itself. It crumbles into these great dissonant slams and begs to be listened to again. The album’s other highlights share this preference for content over studio frills: “Green Belly” and “Don’t You Want To Know (Sue)” stand out for this reason.
Manipulator showcases a great rock sensibility, and exposes another side of Segall’s renowned work ethic—the ability to focus and polish a single set of songs, rather than writing three other sets of songs in the same period of time. But another thing that shines through on Manipulator is the 56 minutes it takes to listen—by the end, it seemed that all the album’s best tricks had been revisited a few times over, with less-than-ideal amounts of variation. This listener was struggling to maintain focus. It’s not, however, a problem with the songs (none of which flopped hard enough to mention here). The problem, if there is one, is the industry convention Segall is working with, the idea of the “full-length album” as a sort of threshold for an artist to reach before his less “single-worthy” songs can be released. This is a convention that was established in a completely different music industry—the logistical limitations that gave it life are gone, and the landscape for music distribution is now, for better and for worse, much more flexible. As for Manipulator, these are two-to-four minute songs that all feel self-contained, ordered in a way that doesn’t seem to offer any significant plot-twists, curveballs, etc. To pile these recordings together into an hour-long album, implying that they should be listened to in a sitting, might be doing good pop songs the disservice of burying them under each other. This doesn’t need to happen.
