Bleep

‘Freedom’s Goblin’ is the new Ty Segall album: 19 tracks strong, with an unrestricted sense of coming together to make an album. It wants you to get your head straight - but first, the process will make your head spin. Back in the ‘Twins’ days, there was talk about the schizophrenia of Ty’s outlook; today, it’s super-dual, with loads of realities all folding back on each other. We’re tracking five or six full-blown personalities, unconcerned with convention or continuity.

The songs came in the flow of the year: days of vomit and days of ecstasy and escape too and days between. The rulebook may have been tossed but ‘Freedom’s Goblin’ is thick with deep songwriting resources, be it stomper, weeper, ballad, screamer, banger or funker-upper, all diverted into new Tydentities - each one marking a different impasse, like a flag whirling into a knot, exploding and burning on contact, in the name of love and loathing.

‘Freedom’s Goblin’ wears a twisted production coat: tracks were cut all around, from LA to Chicago to Memphis, whether chilling at home or touring with the Freedom Band. Five studios were required to get all the sounds down, engineered by Steve Albini, F Bermudez, Lawrence ‘Boo’ Mitchell and of course, Ty himself. The goal was getting free, embracing any approach necessary to communicate new heights and depths, new places for the fuzz to land among octaving harmonies, dancefloor grooves, synths, saxes and horns, jams, post-Nicky-Hopkins R&B electric piano vibes, children-of-the-corn psycho-rebellions, old country waltzes and down-by-the-river shuffles. Basically, the free-est pop songs Ty’s ever put on tape and one about his dog too.