Album Review: Ty-Rex [Reissue] by Ty Segall

In any given year, few Record Store Day exclusives are worth the long lines or inflated prices. Sure, a select number of unearthed B-sides and overdue reissues reward the effort, but there's a whole swath of mediocre cover records destined to linger in the leftovers bin. So many of them read as easy cash grabs—not at all essential unless you're a superfan (because really, those are the only people clamoring to own the Foo Fighters' version of "Kids in America").

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Putting out a covers album can mean a number of things — a) that the artist is quite keen on, or influenced by, the artist that they're covering and wish to put their own spin on things, or b) that the artist feels that their take on the material will surpass the quality of the original, or reinvent it in some way (Ryan Adams' 1989, for example).Or, perhaps it's simply fun to cover someone else's work and put your own subtleties into the mix. The latter is what Ty Segall accomplishes on this reissue of the cleverly titled Ty Rex, an expansion of his six-track, 2011 Record Store Day exclusive release of T. Rex covers.

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Ty Segall and Marc Bolan share a similar style of pop perversion. Their songwriting favours fantastical imagery, gliding hooks that suddenly spring up in pitch and an element of repetition that makes their music no less enjoyable. And despite drawing inspiration from a variety of genres, both are often unfairly lumped under one category (‘glam’ in Bolan’s case, ‘garage’ in Segall’s).‘Ty Rex’ is a set of Bolan covers by Segall that brings together two out-of-print Record Store Day releases, a 12-inch from 2011 and a seven-inch from 2013, with the addition of a previously unreleased take on ’20th Century Boy’ – a gritty rendition that darts along with hardcore intensity.

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The Upshot: Collecting all of Segall’s Marc Bolan covers and touching upon both the hippie and glam phases of the T. Rex mainman, this colored-vinyl album has appeal for both Segal fans and Bolan devotees. The uber-prolific Ty Segall caused a couple of limited edition stirs with his previous Record Store Day “Ty Rex” releases, a 2011 12” EP and a 2013 7” single that found him covering, you guessed it, T.

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