Nearly 40 years on from their initial, unceremonious flameout, the Stooges have been thoroughly absorbed and accepted into the pop-cultural mainstream in ways that would've seemed nigh unimaginable in the early 1970s. Beyond blazing the trail for punk and the subgenres that arose in its wake, their songs have been covered by stadium-rock giants, featured in videogames, successfully mashed-up with Salt N Pepa, soundtracked Kristen Stewart/Dakota Fanning make-out scenes in big-screen biopics, and used to sell Chryslers. But it's no coincidence that all of these middlebrow appropriations draw from the band's 1969 self-titled debut and 1973's Raw Power-- by Stooges standards, the albums you're most likely to reach for when entertaining house guests.
The band's infamous 1970 sophomore release, Funhouse, has remained largely undisturbed by the music supervisors of the world, because, as even casual Stooges fans know, you just don't fuck with Fun House. It isn't simply a collection of classic proto-punk songs, it's a very real, physical, suffocating space. It's an album in which you get locked and trapped, and from which you reemerge a different person. Over the course of its 36 minutes, Iggy Pop's temperament is gradually debased from the cocksure swagger of opener "Down on the Street" to the screaming, strait-jacketed psychosis of the closing "L.A. Blues". It's an album that even one of the most absurdly over-the-top box sets in rock history couldn't decode or demystify.
But if Fun House is like that creepy dilapidated domicile at the end of the street, the Ty Segall Band are the neighborhood punks who break into it late at night just for kicks, spray paint the walls, and leave behind a small mountain of empty beer cans. Now, the Ty Segall Band are not the Stooges; their full-throttle, pedal-squashing thrust makes no allowances for the Stooges' underrated sense of groove and funk, and Segall is way more of a sucker for pop melody than Iggy ever was. But Slaughterhouse sees them redrafting the Fun House floor plan for their own devious devices: there's that evocative title, for one, and the fact that both albums end with extended, free-form noise meltdowns (in Segall's case, the self-explanatory "Fuzz War"). But most of all, they've vividly captured Fun House's unapologetic griminess, blast-furnace heat, and panic attack-inducing lack of oxygen.
Slaughterhouse is also the closest thing to a concept album we've heard from Segall, whose reputation has been built upon on a ceaseless stream of releases born of a hyperactive whimsy. And where the Lennon-like turns on 2011's Drag City debut, Goodbye Bread, suggested Segall was following a similar pop-leaning path to garage-reared peers like Smith Westerns, Black Lips, and the late Jay Reatard, it was answered earlier this year by a wiggy, scatterbrained collaboration with psych-folkie White Fence. But on Slaughterhouse, Segall's impulsiveness yields to a holistic aesthetic. Segall has described it as "evil space rock" in interviews, but Slaughterhouse feels more subterranean and animalistic than that descriptor suggests. This is an album that opens with a scorching double-shot of Motor City-burning rave-ups ("Death" and "I Bought My Eyes") and a title track that recalls Nirvana with a serious case of Tourette's, and then just gets faster, heavier, and nastier as it progresses; even the withering mid-album sludgefeast "Wave Goodbye" eventually intensifies into a fiercely militaristic, machine-gunned finale. (Only a crazed, abruptly terminated cover of the Bo Diddley/Captain Beefheart standard "Diddy Wah Diddy"-- which ends with Segall screaming "fuck this fucking song!" before admitting with a laugh, "I don't know what we're doing!"-- breaks the album's sinister spell.)
Remarkably, Slaughterhouse's extra heft doesn't come at the expense of Segall's melodic gifts and Nuggets-schooled economy. It's one thing to be heavy, and it's another thing to be hooky, but Slaughterhouse is the rare garage-rock album to do both so well simultaneously: the hopped-up harmonies of "Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart" sound like Hamburg-era Beatles on a particularly potent amphetamines binge, and "That's the Bag I'm In" could almost pass for a bygone mid-60s Animals hit, were it not recorded to approximate the sound of Segall drowning in a sewer. But Slaughterhouse's surprising bounty of crust-covered pop hooks doesn't so much temper the album's ferocious attack as adrenalize the Ty Segall Band's performances to lightning-fast, bloodletting extremes. Which makes the aforementioned "Fuzz War" the only logical way to bring the album's careening momentum to a halt. Comprising 10 minutes of ominous feedback drones and hailstorm drum rattles, the colossal closer proves to be less guitar-carnage climax than scorched-earth aftermath, an opportunity to tally up the body count and mop up the entrails. But while "Fuzz War" may be an uncharacteristic moment of excess on another otherwise lean and mean album, it reinforces the idea of Slaughterhouse as a real place to get lost in-- and the only way out is through the killing floor.
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