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Music

Fuzz

FUZZ with CCR HEADCLEANER and TEENAGER at Parts & Labour (1566 Queen West), Wednesday (October 16), 9 pm. $10. RT, SS, TW.


You know those guitarists who compulsively play their six-string? They pick it up the moment they come through the door, frig around with it while watching TV, keep it nearby while they sleep. That’s Charlie Moothart.

“I just love playing guitar,” he says over the phone from Arizona, where FUZZ, his new proto-metal band with Ty Segall, just played the first show of their first major North American tour. “Any chance I get, I sit down and play.

“It’s funny, Ty used to give me shit for it cuz on tour we’d be backstage before the show and I’d start playing. He’d look at me and laugh and be like, ‘Dude, you play guitar every day and you’re still playing right now?’ It can’t be stopped.”

Moothart is quick to add that Segall loves playing guitar, too. But that’s obvious to anyone familiar with the insanely prolific San Francisco garage-rocker’s career. And that’s why it’s surprising to find Segall behind the drum kit in FUZZ, smashing away as maniacally and virtuosically as he smashes his strings in the Ty Segall Band, with whom Moothart also plays.

Rounded out by bassist Chad Ubovich, the lineup is anything but surprising to Moothart. He and Segall have been in bands together since high school, back when Segall was primarily a drummer. (“He’s always been one of the best drummers I know.”) They’d tried to get a band like FUZZ – far more psych metal than garage rock – happening for a while, but the timing was never right.

“In retrospect, I think it was fate almost,” says Moothart, “because the songs weren’t there yet.”

They are now. FUZZ’s self-titled debut record, newly out on In the Red, is heavy business, with killer riffs, raucous rhythms, paranoid lyrics and Segall’s distant, lo-fi vocals. Moothart’s love of guitar comes through loudly in the all-encompassing blues-rock licks, given lightness and colour thanks to his Hendrixian flourishes and fluidity.

He cites Blue Cheer’s Outsideinside as his favourite album, and his father’s Black Sabbath records as an influence.

“I think that since we all have so much access to music these days, there are bands everybody likes but that you’re not allowed to touch. I like to think pretty much everybody likes Black Sabbath. More or less. In some way.

“Maybe I’m totally wrong about that. But I hope I’m right.”

carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillis

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