Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees with Flesh Lights, Gal Pals

San Francisco psych wunderkind Ty Segall continues a tireless musical assault on ears and minds with his third album Melted. Segall says it sounds like “cherry cola, Sno-Cones and taffy.” Indeed! Over the past two years he’s released records more often than most people do laundry, but somehow there is still a heap of anticipation for this new album on Goner packed full of truly psychedelic pop songs with great vocals and exciting arrangements.

On the heels of two critically acclaimed solo albums, Segall holed up in a basement studio with Mike Donovan of the Sic Alps in late 2009 and early 2010 to come up with Melted. It’s a carefree yet precise balance of acoustic and electric elements. Distorted echo and thunder mix together with enough clean guitar lines and addictive choruses to deliver an album that recalls the ’60s without sounding like anything created during that decade. Time melts away, vision melts away, minds melt away. Get Melted!

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions Thee Oh Sees? Probably their riot-sparking live show, right? Visions of a guitar-chewing, speaker-smothering, tongue-wagging John Dwyer careening across your cranium, chased by a wild-eyed wrecking crew that drives every last hook home like it’s a nail in the coffin of what you thought it meant to make 21st century rock ’n’ roll?

Yeah, that sounds about right. But it misses a more important point—how impossible Thee Oh Sees have been been to pin down since Dwyer launched it in the late ‘90s as a solo break from such sorely missed underground bands as Pink and Brown and Coachwhips. (While Dwyer often records songs on his own, Thee Oh Sees is now a four-piece featuring keyboardist/singer Brigid Dawson, guitarist Petey Dammit, and drummer Mike Shoun)

That restlessness extends to everything from the towering, 13-minute title track of 2010’s Warm Smile LP to the mercurial moods of 2008’s The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In. And then there’s the Bay Area band’s recent track record, including a scrappy tour split with Total Control, the home-brewed symphonies of Castlemania and the high wire hooks of Carrion Crawler/The Dream, which dropped a second drum set among sunburnt organs, dovetailing guitars and rail-jumping rhythms.