Slaughterhouse

Those of you who came on board with Goodbye Bread may want to take Slaughterhouse's album cover as a warning: Ty Segall has peeled back the hangdog veneer of his sweetly melancholic 2011 breakthrough effort. This goes for the new LP's shrieking-banshee artwork as well as its sound, a fuzzy blitzkrieg that begins with one minute of aimless, atonal sludge and ends with 10 more. Too-cute tags like "flower punk" might neatly encapsulate many of the lo-fi prince's peers, but they're not expansive enough to sum up even a single song on Slaughterhouse. The album is the best evidence yet of Segall's talent for wickedly skewing and seamlessly blending his influences, but it succeeds because its footnotes never upstage its teeth-rattling, blissful noise. The cartoonish, nasally vocals of highlight "Wave Goodbye" are offset by a scorching solo and the rhythm section's Led Zeppelin-like brontosaurus stomp, resulting in a sort of psychedelia painted pitch-black. Elsewhere, the bile-drenched "That's the Bag I'm In" caricatures the Cramps, though it's arguably more violent than anything cut by the psychobilly band. Likewise, Segall's take on Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" might parody bluesy machismo and pretentious self-destruction, but it's also the heaviest, most warped version of the oft-covered song. If you want to mentally engage with Segall's deconstruction of hard rock tropes, Slaughterhouse will hold up to the scrutiny. Yet it's also the kind of record you'll reach for when you simply want to turn your mind off. It's really just a matter of adjusting the volume.