A few seconds into Hair, the scuzzy garage-rock throwdown released earlier this month by Ty Segall and White Fence (a.k.a. Tim Presley), it’s hard to tell whether you’ve stumbled into some dark Gregorian ritual gone awry, or perhaps the MC5 tuning up between jams. As loose and unruly as that makes it sound (further noted: the album was banged out in six days), the results are positively savantlike in their genius.
Segall calls San Francisco home, but it feels like he’s been everywhere for the past few years, appearing on numerous split EPs with a close-knit network of basement punk Jacobins including Nashville’s JEFF the Brotherhood, Ottawa’s the White Wires, Britain’s Armitage Shanks and France’s Feeling of Love. Presley, meanwhile, has been just as busy on L.A.’s hardcore scene as a member of the Nerve Agents and Darker My Love; he’s also made a madcap grip of albums as White Fence, including last year’s schizophrenic Is Growing Faith and his latest, Family Perfume, Vol. 1.
Together Segall and Presley gleefully stretch punk’s boundaries, delving into down-tempo psychobilly on “Crybaby” and freak folk on “The Black Glove/Rag,” which vaguely recalls Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” through a haze of bad acid. At Webster Hall, look for Segall—backed by the excellent combo of Mikal Cronin, Charlie Moothart and Emily Rose Epstein, all of whom join him on the forthcoming Slaughterhouse—to literally pull out the kitchen sink for a guitar solo; in the live video shot for Incase Design’s Room 205 online series, he scrapes a TV set over the strings near the end of Presley’s “I Am Not a Game.”—Bill Murphy