Album Review: Ty Segall & White Fence - Hair

San Francisco has one of the hardest-working music movements going around today, with a multitude of acts and artists adamant that touring and recording are the lifeblood of music. Two of the newer kids on the SF garage block are Ty Segall and Tim Presley (aka White Fence). Both guys have taken on the 1960s lo-fi psych route and attempted to fuse it with their own individualistic flourishes, thus creating some of the most iconic sounds in the genre of recent years (Segall's Goodbye Bread and WF's Is Growing Faith were two of the best albums of 2011). Now Segall and Presley have joined forces on Hair.

The best thing about this collaboration is that it is much more than two like-minded, similar-sounding fellas having a jam at home. If anything, Hair proves how disparate each artist's sound actually is. The LP opens with Time, and it is apparent early that the resultant racket will be as slipshod and fun as anything either of them has released in the past. Halfway through this track there is a tempo change straight out of the dog-eared, well-worn '60s garage and psychedelia playbook. Things rarely veer from this terrain. Yet it is forever to their credit that Segall and Presley don't sound like bowerbirds, stealing from others in a hodgepodge fashion. Crybaby is a swinging, swaggering party monster; Scissor People segues from a heady paisley jam into a deviant dirge with nary a backward glance.

Hair is an aggressive, frantic and fun record that perfectly showcases what it is that Segall and Presley are actually doing. They aren't re-inventing the wheel – they are making it infinitely better.