TY SEGALL with WHITE FENCE, THE STRANGE BOYS and TEENANGER at the Horseshoe, Saturday, May 12. Rating: NNNNN
Modern garage rock is sometimes denigrated as a genre lacking originality, an unabashed throwback to an earlier era of self-consciously backwards-looking good-time music.
It doesn’t help that many of the style’s greatest figures are also their most prolific, releasing albums at an impossibly rapid pace that belies their inventiveness (albeit within somewhat strict parameters).
As “easy” as they might seem on paper, however, the bands on display at the Horseshoe on Saturday night – Ty Segall, White Fence, The Strange Boys and Teenanger – all approached the agreed-upon tropes from different angles and with varying approaches, displaying multiple facets of what might be considered a limited genre.
Teenanger opened the bill as the night’s only local offering, but the band’s short-but-sweet set of snotty, ‘70s punk influenced rave-ups suggested they deserve to be on any Toronto garage bill, beyond any sort of token status.
The Strange Boys, meanwhile, came at the R&B influenced Nuggets that make up the garage bible from more of a southern blues by way of Dylan & The Band slant, offering an impressively tight set of swamp rock to a slowly-filling venue that would soon reach well-deserved and deeply-felt capacity.
But things hit another gear once White Fence hit the stage. The solo-ish project of Tim Presley (sometimes member of Darker My Love, The Fall and the aforementioned Strange Boys), White Fence trade in British-influenced ’60s psychedelia that uses its paisley-tinged tunes as a springboard for long, drawn-out jams. As full of strangely-infectious skewed Syd Barrett hooks as the music was, Presley’s guitar heroics were the star of the show, and they found sympathetic ears in a restless, energetic Horseshoe crowd that he repeatedly categorized as the best he’d ever played to.
As original as the bands may be, at its heart garage rock is party music, and for better or worse the audience definitely came to party. The mosh pit never abated from the moment White Fence started playing, and the stage quickly became a wonderland for both experienced stage divers and curious rookies.
Ty Segall is used to playing to such ridiculously rabblerousing crowds, especially in Toronto where he’s almost always greeted with an incongruously hardcore reaction, but this may have been his rowdiest yet.
Much heavier and higher-energy than even his loudest, most fuzz-laden recordings attest, the 23-year-old San Francisco bandleader’s live show practically demands a fanatical response, but it briefly seemed like this one may have roused his annoyance. As the one overworked, exasperated security guard let his own anger get the better of him in too-violently shoving divers into the audience if they paused for too long off the stage, Segall paused to gently urge both him and the revelers to cool down. He later asked the beer-spraying crowd to indulge him in pogoing rather than moshing (one of many hints that his sensibility is rooted decades ago, despite his long blond Cobain locks).
But Segall couldn’t resist the unbridled enthusiasm of his audience, and by the end he was its main instigator. Ripping through a set of material that spanned his short but prolific career, including a few collaborative songs with White Fence, Segall was on his game, synthesizing his psych, pop, punk and grunge aspect under piles of distortion and fuzz.
After an attempt to crowdsurf while soloing went awry, Segall sacrificed his guitar to the audience while singing from within the belly of the beast. Later, he managed to hook his legs around the Horseshoe’s ceiling sprinkler pipe and sing upside down, while the audience held his microphone. If he seemed exasperated at first, Segall was definitely getting into the vibe by the end.
Called back to the stage with one of the most exuberant “one more song” chants I’ve ever heard, Segall indulged the crowd in one last effort as accidentally broken bottles became an epidemic, and as the sweaty, writhing mass finally abetted with his final blast of distortion he instructed everyone in the audience to give each other a hug. After such an tremendous communal experience, it felt 100% earned.
Almost in spite of himself, Ty Segall put on yet another legendary Toronto gig.
Here he is playing Toronto for NXNE last summer.
