Album Review: Ty Segall - Sleeper

Prodigious and prolific Bay Area garage upstart Ty Segall is only just now releasing his first album for 2013, having dropped three long-players last year, and he's lowered the volume significantly to fly his freak flag high. Sadly, Segall's adoptive father died late last year and the fallout found him estranged from his mother, so now Sleeper sees him using acoustic guitars and ambient arrangements to craft a seemingly cathartic response to those traumatic events.

It's a meditative batch of songs but not mired in melancholy, and Segall is an accomplished enough songwriter to pull this new mood off. He touched on such relatively mellow domains to a degree on 2011's Goodbye Bread, but here he's taken that shift to its logical extreme, songs such as the languid psych-folk title-track, the pastoral, Bert Jansch-channelling The Keeper, the swampy blues of 6th Street and the lo-fi acoustic glam number, Sweet C.C., all sounding miles removed from his past fare. Elsewhere the '60s-tinged builder, Come Outside, brings a welcome whiff of menace to proceedings, while reflective closer, The West – which actually refers directly to his parents – strangely ends the album on a jaunty, upbeat note (musically at any rate).

This relatively dark and desolate batch of songs will almost certainly prove to be a detour rather than a new direction for Segall – expect riffs aplenty next time around – but it's still a fascinating and quite brave new facade for this precocious young talent.