Emotional Mugger

by 
AlbumJan 22 / 201611 songs, 38m 9s
Garage Rock
Popular Highly Rated

One-man cottage industry Ty Segall has assumed so many different garage-rock guises over the years (from Stooges-style fury to glammy, T-Rex-esque ballads) that the blend had ultimately become his own. A strange, restlessly catchy album glazed with buzzing synthesizers and alien vocal effects, *Emotional Mugger* stitches together the fever-dream psychedelia of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd (“California Hills”) with warped humor reminiscent of early Frank Zappa (“Baby Big Man (I Want a Mommy)”) into a sound as alluring as it is unsettling.

(what are they thinking) guitars sliced with scribble graffiti sprawled across the hemispheres; stuttered, stunted, dual-mono machine dreams flashing sudden stereophobic and back again / two screens alone together squeezing shaking oozing metallic pool like brain blood, slowly draining away all mental life. shaking ass / nihility at most corrodes candy’s gone no more fun

7.3 / 10

Each song on Ty Segall's eighth album seems to be an oblique short story about cheap thrills. The album's populated with addicts—people engineered to come back for more despite how shitty it may ultimately make them feel. Segall seems less focused on hitting the exact right notes and more concerned with establishing a strange, offbeat vibe, a match for the disembodied menace of the smiling doll heads on the sleeve.

A-

It should be more exhausting to keep up with Ty Segall. The clip at which the garage-glam savant releases records is on par with the ’70s supernatural output of our dear departed friend David Bowie. Like Bowie, Segall is so self-aware, so in touch with his own levitating aura, that he’s able to casually hitch genres…

8 / 10

7 / 10

Prolific California singer-guitarist gives us a blast of hard-driving, psychedelic rock that showcases his guitar skills while indulging in some more left-field experimentation.

8.4 / 10

In the interest of foregoing the usual chronicling of Ty Segall’s chameleonic artistic turnarounds, suffice it to say that…

Check out our album review of Artist's Emotional Mugger on Rolling Stone.com.

An album bursting with ideas, it too often disappears up its own - let’s say - ego.

Anyone who was wondering if Ty Segall was ever going to deliver another set of raw, scuzzy garage rock after the relatively polished approach of 2013's Sleeper and 2014's Manipulator will be happy (or alarmed) to know Segall is very much in touch with his noisy side on 2016's Emotional Mugger.

8 / 10

Call 1-800-281-2968, and you'll be subjected to an off-putting message from Ty Segall, grody sound effects and all ("I am itching to hear ho...

8.5 / 10

"No man is good three times" reads the sticker that adorns the cover of Ty Segall's latest full-length solo record, Emotional Mugger. It's the mantra that was at the heart of the reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt's controversial victory in the 1944 U.S. P

7 / 10

Few artists can claim to be as prolific as Ty Segall. Over the past decade, he’s released nine studio albums under his own name, two as the drummer

Segall remains less interested in fine-tuning a specific sound than endlessly experiment with new tools and attitudes.

8 / 10

7.1 / 10

'Emotional Mugger' by TY Segall, album review by Gregory Adams. The full-length comes out on January 22nd via Drag City. TY Segall plays 1/19 San Francisco

After the poppy directness of his last proper album, Segall gets dissonant and unruly on his latest

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Album Reviews: Ty Segall - Emotional Mugger