Hello, Hi is a mostly mellow acoustic album (he opened his show at First Avenue with “Good Morning” from Hello, Hi and possibly “Saturday Pt. 1” and “Saturday Pt. 2“). Much of its sound is reminiscent of pre-glam T. Rex when Marc Bolan and Steve Peregrin Took were doing their psychedelic folk thing, sounding like they would be most comfortable strumming a lute around the May Pole. Recorded in 2020 during the pandemic shutdown (the closing song “Distraction” pretty much perfectly sums up those weird months), Hello, Hi feels very introspective, intimate and quiet: many tracks are just Ty alone with his guitar, his voice frequently high and a little warbly as if just at the edge of being overcome by emotion – see especially “Blue” when his overdubbed harmonies croon “you can’t erase the pain.” His cover of The Mantles‘ “Don’t Lie” is lovely and lilting and “Looking At You” is simply beautiful, a little reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s mellower work, and one of my favorite songs on the record. He does add in some electric buzz and fuzz as the song builds toward its end. My top track is the total, all-out buzzed and fuzzed title track rocker “Hello, Hi.”

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From Allmusic “The most underrated of Tyrannosaurus Rex’s four albums, Prophets, Seers & Sages was recorded just six months after their debut and adds little to the landscapes which that set mapped out. There is the same reliance on the jarring juxtaposition of rock rhythms in a folky discipline; the same abundance of obscure, private mythologies; the same skewed look at the latest studio dynamics, fed through the convoluted wringer of the duo’s imagination – the already classic pop of the opening “Deboraarobed” is further dignified by its segue into the same performance played backwards, a fairly groundbreaking move at a time when even the Beatles were still burying such experiments deep in the mix. [“Deboraarobed” is a remix of their first single “Debora.”] But if the album itself found the duo rooted to the musical spot, still it delivered some of Marc Bolan’s most resonant songs. The nostalgia-flavored “Stacey Grove” and the contrarily high-energy “Conesuela” were as peerless as any of Bolan’s more feted compositions. Equally intriguing is the confidence which exudes from “Scenes of Dynasty,” a successor of sorts to the last album’s “Scenesof,” but presented with just percussion and some strange vocal noises to accompany Bolan’s singing – at a time when “singing” was maybe not the term a lot of listeners would employ for his vocals. The excited “one-two-three-four” count-in only adds to the dislocation, of course. Finally, the owlishly contagious “Salamanda Palaganda” offers a first-hand peek into the very mechanics of Bolan’s songwriting. Other composers stuck for a rhyme either reach for the thesaurus or abandon the lyric altogether. Bolan simply made one up, and in the process created a whole new language – half nonsense, half mystery, but wholly intoxicating. Just like the rest of the album, in fact.”

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