Ty Segall had method behind his madness as he tore through 9:30 Club on Thursday night showcasing songs from his recent concept album, Emotional Mugger. Backed by The Muggers—a five-piece band featuring Mikal Cronin, Kyle Thomas (a.k.a. King Tuff), and other notables—the protean singer-songwriter delivered an eccentrically electrifying set that merged retro-rock muscle with performance-art theatricality.
On the central idea behind his current project, Segall has said: “Emotional mugging is a psychoanalytic subject-to-subject exchange formed as a response to our hyper-digital sexual landscape.” In essence, the 28-year-old Californian appears to have conceived Emotional Mugger as a commentary on the dystopian effects of social media, like “Facebook addiction, fucking Instagram” and other quintessentially (post)modern modes of human connection.
At the 9:30 Club, fans were thrust headlong into this thematic space with little warning or explanation. The singer took the stage wearing an unsettlingly grotesque rubber baby mask over a three-piece suit, embodying the alter ego “Sloppo.” Launching into Emotional Mugger‘s lead track, “Squealer,” Segall worked the crowd like a maniacal cult leader as he delivered his firebrand vocals over the band’s burly stoner-metal groove. The spastic stop-and-start dynamics of the ensuing “Californian Hills” helped ignite a frenzied vibe.
The mask came off and on at various points as Segall and his cohorts ran through the entirety of Emotional Mugger in sequence (excluding the sound collage “W.U.O.T.W.S.”). Songs like the title track, “Baby Big Man (I Want a Mommy)”, and “Mandy Cream” generally displayed a heavy psychedelic-rock sound, with Sabbath-inspired low-end sludge spiked by Thomas’ caustic lead-guitar noodlings and Cory Hanson’s trippy synths. Segall stayed in character throughout this portion of the show, his viscerally abstract lyrics and bizarre banter frequently returning to pseudo-Freudian motifs of infantile traumas and fixations.
While the new songs came across well live (even if the concept really didn’t), the show took off to another level during the second half of the set, which featured standout earlier material from Segall’s extensive catalog. “Thank God for Sinners” got perhaps the biggest response, as fans took turns stage-diving amidst the song’s anthemic, garage-rock hooks.
The simpler, more familiar pleasures of popular favorites such as “You’re the Doctor” and “Spiders” invigorated and emboldened the crowd, and Segall was happy to oblige. At one point, he recruited a fan (Monica) for a “safety exercise” during which she crowdsurfed from the stage all the way to the soundboard and back. It was one of many such incidents that 9:30 staff didn’t even bother trying to stop, as fans ventured freely onto the stage, even commandeering the mic a few times.
After the main set concluded with a torrid rendition of “Feel”, a three-song encore featured “The Feels” and “Finger.” The show culminated with the stirring crescendos of “The Singer,” with The Muggers taking turns soloing (Cronin contributed an elegant saxophone melody) as Segall coaxed his voice into a soulful falsetto.
