The Scene

Look, I don’t know about you, but I love me some bone-crunching, chest-thumping, loud, abrasive rock and roll. The louder the better, man. There’s just nothing else like it. Raw and absolutely filthy. Blood still dripping off the carcass.

It’s a health thing, really. Instead of letting the busy world trap you under its thumb, just unleash all that pent up rage and frustration with a decent stereo system and some fuzzy shreddage. Go a little mental now and then to keep from going insane. Let off some steam.

That’s where Fuzz comes in. The second album from the San Franciscan group that began as yet another Ty Segall side project (Segall being the most prolific and fascinating of that wicked cool San Fran Garage Rock scene). They’re harbingers of a simpler time, singing paeans to the lost art of rocking out. The name is a promise as much as anything else. This is simple, badass music and it gets me harder than a John Bonham drum solo.

The Songs

Time Collapse II / The Terror – Patiently sliding that fader into audibility, reverse-filtered tones of unease crumbling before a rapid, charging riff. Segall sings like a goblin possessed. It’s fantastic.
Rat Race – Bit more of a groove to this track. A shorter basket of riffage and general, determined fun. A kind of proggie feel to it as well (which carries throughout).
Let It Live – Man, this song, this goddamn song. Absolute mind-annihilating jam right here. That bass will make your brain fry, that riff will rip you where you stand. Forget about that trash they play on The Edge, this should be the song of the summer.
Pollinate – Heavy, man. Like an anvil dropping from the sky, landing flat upon your inhibitions.
Bringer of Light – Just a bit slower than it feels like it should be, dragging you along with it. Chad Ubovich is a bass-playing wizard, and not one of those silly Harry Potter ones either, but a full on necromancer.
Pipe – Those Black Sabbath records must be worn right through. Love the wobble in the main run. “Oh you will never, never be alone. Oh you will never, never go home”.
Say Hello – Yeah g’day Fuzz. Pleased to meet ya. Cheers for the badass 100 second intro and the monstrously cool tunage that follows. Nothing gets you more pent up than a pregnant pause in a loud song.
Burning Wreath – The quiet, reverbed intro is sweet and ominously out of place. True to form, the guitars soon take a turn for the hectic. The twin-guit interplay in the last sorta minute and a half is pure carnage.
Red Flag – The shortest of the lot. 1:50 of punk rock resolution. RED FLAG!
Jack the Maggot – A brooding and ominous snarl of a song. Production’s top notch. Nobody does those super-heavy-yet-somehow-melodic choruses like Ty Segall.
New Flesh – About as filthy as it sounds. Swaggering back and forth around one of the smoother melodies before a real workout from the axeman.
Sleestak – A few studio tricks, they’re having fun towards the back end of things.
Silent Sits the Dust Bowl – Not sure what the title means but the song is a slight departure, letting some strings crash the party, which is pretty cool, though the song’s a little loop-ish.
II – The proggiest idea of all time: it’s a near-14 minute long instrumental built upon a foundation of loud guitars and thumping drums. Like all long instrumentals, it’s as much about jamming as a band than anything else and it’s not always easy to listen the whole way through. But then like most of the good ones, there’s plenty to pick up along the way if you do. Put it this way: It’s not the worst track here.

The Vibe

Imagine for a second that you are within a Hammer Horror film. There are hooded characters all around you, chanting some unintelligible incantation. A pretty woman is tied to a table in the middle of the room, encircled by the hoods, who are slowly engulfing here. You are in an old, gothic mansion. From the road it looks like any other but within it foul deeds unfold. Ritualistic blood-letting. Demonic forces within. And yet… it’s kind of non-threatening all the same (probably to do with the production value).

That’s about the vibe you get from Fuzz. Their last album was a little less prog-rock and more punk-rock, this one feels like it could star the late-great Christopher Lee. It has that early Sabbath feel. There’s a genuine darkness to it but it’s the kind that you don’t mind crawling up into.

A lot of that is down to the same thing that follows most of these San Fran rockers around – no matter how far they get from their parents’ garage, there’s still an undeniable sense of fun about their records. They’re all buds, they all grew up together and this has never been close to a job or a chore for them. They’re making hardass rock and roll for the absolute love of it. All the mood and menace doesn’t overthrow the joyousness. Hey, it ain’t for everyone, but it wasn’t really made for anyone but the group themselves.

The Music

You sorta know what to expect from a band like this and that is, blissfully, what you get. It’s guitar driven proto-metallic, headbangin’ throwback. The drums pound. The bass is heavy. The riffs are fierce and coarse. This is what you wished you played to piss off your parents when you were 16, only you weren’t cool enough to know about it so you watched that DVD of Almost Famous again.

The band has a way of salvaging feeling beneath the menace of songs with these secretly melodic choruses, disguised under layers of noise and, yes, fuzz. I give Segall the credit for that. He’s been doing it for years on his solo stuff – check out ‘Sleepers’ and tell me that album couldn’t have easily been just as heavy as this had be not been in an acoustic mood (and the songs hold up either way). That’s just good song writing for ya. Segall has a genuine line on classic rock mentalities and it shines through. Hey, Black Sabbath had that too, they pretty much are classic rock. Don’t even get me started on Zeppelin either. (Also: KING CRIMSON!)

If that sounds like an English-leaning influence then that’s because it is. Segall, when he sings, even has this sorta snarly faux-British drawl that he likes to use. But there’s a bit too much Segall in this review and Charlie Moothart, guitarist, deserves just as much praise. He’s irrepressible on the axe. There’s no shortage of wonderfully destructive noises emanating from his fingers and that’s one of the keys to the album because, whether it’s an illusion or not, it really feels like these songs just came to them over a couple weeks jamming in the studio. This isn’t an intricately arranged album. At least that’s not how it’s presented. It’s all about the passion of it, like all good ‘side projects’.

The lyrics stray on fairly standard topics for this kinda stuff: woodland terror, occultish weirdness and master/slave dynamics. It’s cool, that’s pretty much the point. The vocals tend to be quite filtered though, often buried in the mix to the point where they’re just another instrument.

I will say this: Maybe II is too long. Their debut album was a shade under 40 minutes, where as this one goes comfortably over the hour mark. Not all of the songs are of the highest quality that these maestros are capable of. Plus they are all a bit to same-same to really fill out a full double album, so many riff-based crunchers, ya know?

Revelations

“The darkest surgeons up in the sky/The Regulator realize/you all will die”

If Legolas had access to electricity, I reckon he’d be jamming Fuzz on the stereo.

“You are the flesh in the mirror”

There are bands with incredibly misleading names. This is not one of them.

“Watching all the people walking/ I wonder if they feel alone?/ See their feet touch the emptiness/ I can’t hear it at all”

Imagine if II (the song not the album) had been it’s own EP? Side one and side two, just a single track. That’d be awesome.

“Teeth twisting in the heatwave/Day dreaming of a clean wave”

“Fuzz is Ty Segall (drums/vocals), Charlie Moothart (guitar/vocals), and Chad Ubovich (bass).”

Ty Segal: Check out his solo stuff, and if you dig this one, especially get your hands on the Ty Segall Band record ‘Slaughterhouse’. His 2014 album ‘Manipulator’ is a pure glory.

Charlie Moothart: Plays in the Ty Segall Band, started Fuzz as a duo with Segall a few years back.

Chad Ubovich: MEATBODIES! They had a great album, self-titled, in 2014. A little more punk and a little more psych. Very cool.

“From these valleys we will bloom/sands will boil through/and leave the watchers watching/burning from the hill”

From In The Red Records:

“The mood is not light. The songs project a state of perpetual paranoia and eroding mental health. And as it should be, you know? It's a record for the burners.”

Finale

It’s pretty awesome when a side-project can take on the quality of a fully fleshed out band, that’s a luxury you have when you A) make music for the love and passion, and B) play it with dudes you’ve known since you were a teenager. The chemistry is strong throughout and the vision is shared. Being the lads that they are, especially Segall, there’s bound to be plenty more stuff in the can from various other enterprises (Ty just released a limited edition VHS-only album that’ll see regular formats early 2016) but they all work so damn hard that this surely won’t be the last we hear of Fuzz. For example, the lead single/vid wasn’t even on the album:

Their debut was more strictly fuzzy, while this one added extra punch and, to be honest, better songs. The project has evolved into its own, no small part due to the inclusion of Ubovich on bass. He helps fill these songs out, taking them into a more realised place. It’s a wicked cool record that’ll slay over summer among the right crowds. There’s only one recommendation to make, really:

Play it loud. Play it goddamn loud.