Album Review: Deforming Lobes [Live] by Ty Segall

Ever since someone got the idea that an album should be more than a bunch of singles put onto a bigger piece of plastic, musicians have faced a particular dilemma: if you've made an ambitious and stylistically eclectic album, how do you make that work when you're playing those songs at your show? 2018's Freedom's Goblin was one of the most expansive and diverse projects of Ty Segall's quite prolific career, but when it came time to hit the road after the album dropped, Segall came up with a simple but effective formula: forget the minutia and rock out big time. 2019's Deforming Lobes was recorded during two January 2018 shows in Los Angeles, and the song list curiously omits any tunes from Freedom's Goblin. What it does deliver is Segall and his band laying into their music as if their lives depended on it.

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On his 2018 tour de force, Freedom's Goblin, Ty Segall provided us with a double-album highlight reel of every aesthetic the restless garage rocker has explored in his first decade as a solo artist, from light-speed hardcore to idyllic psychedelic-folk balladry to 12-minute fretboard-snapping jams. But in an interview conducted on the eve of the album's release, Segall suggested the album represented the closing of a chapter. "I feel like I've barely even tapped anything," he said, before revealing a desire to experiment with electronic production and make a hip-hop album.

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If there's one thing you can count on with a record Steve Albini worked on, it's an unashamedly authentic look at the artist in question. The famed recording engineer's work with artists like PJ Harvey, Nirvana and the Pixies have resulted in some of the purest distillations of each artist's musical persona.   With Deforming Lobes, a live record from Ty Segall and his Freedom Band, we get a chance to hear the group in perhaps the most authentic way: in the same room, on a stage, in front of a crowd. It's a raw, warts-and-all performance ….

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Deforming Lobes by Ty Segall Even Ty Segall's studio albums sound live. Never a big fan of studio fuckery, found sounds, overdubs or string arrangements, his last several albums featuring the Freedom Band—that's him, Mikal Cronin, Charlie Moothart, Ben Boyes and Emmett Kelly—have been molten slabs of feedback and guitar noise. Yet this one, the first all-Segall live recording (he split a 2015 Live at Pickathon with King Tuff), manages to increase the intensity.

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