Ty Segall: Lemons

Label: Goner

Viewing the second album by the young San Franciscan Ty Segall as merely a part of some non-trend, say the new wave of lo-fi garage-scuzz, does a disservice to him, you, me, and Don Van Vliet. Segall is a genuine rock artist, someone who displays the range of human emotions in a form that also happens to get you jumping up and shaking your hips in a pre-apocalyptic shimmy. Lemons is flush with informed garage rock, meaning that strains of 60s punk and a certain pubby R&B sensibility (he is on Goner, Memphis’s choicest indie) color the proceedings. Sounding at times like a less disdainful Dan Melchior, Segall shares that British ex-pat’s keen yet omnivorous taste in influences: the one cover here is of Captain Beefheart’s awesome “Dropout Boogie.” Alongside the Oh Sees and the Intelligence, Segall is proving that rock is anything but a dead language in 2009. (M.L. Thrope)