Anybody who is familiar with Ty Segall could probably namedrop another artist to which he owes at least a fraction of his sound. (Let’s say The Stooges, for example.) But if you can’t give Segall credit for pure sonic originality, you ought to give him the time of day for his sheer music knowledge. No release to date by this San Francisco garage rocker best represents the origins of his grisly rock vision and record geekiness than his T. Rex cover album, Ty Rex (Goner Records).

In a year where the inspiration for cover records are frequently lazy or gimmicky (see Ryan Adams’ 1989), it might be easy to read Segall’s covering of glam-rock titan Marc Bolan and his band T. Rex as just that. But the performances on this record, which is a combined reissue of two previously released T. Rex cover EPs, seem to indicate otherwise. Segall plays these songs like a diehard fan who just so happens to be a serious musician. He performs with his gut, with a level of passion equivalent to the original artist without ever belittling the songs to a joke.

Segall’s perspective on the originals might only be noticeable for big T. Rex fans, as the covers usually don’t bring about great changes in instrumentation or arrangement. There’s a simple change in tempo on “Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart” and Segall exchanges T. Rex’s classic blues-rock riffs for a wall of noise on the outro of “Elemental Child.” Ty Rex is by-and-large the cohesion of Segall doing T. Rex true-to-form and his own grisly, off-the-cuff garage style to make the songs his own. Rather than blowing through T. Rex’s “greatest hits,” Segall curated a selection of songs that span a significant portion of the group’s repertoire. (The only standout to a casual listener would be a refurbished “20th Century Boy,” which, as expected, shreds.) Segall even covers some ’60s era T. Rex, when they were acoustic purists and referred to long-form as Tyrannosaurus Rex. At the risk of generalizing, Segall’s output is not unlike that of T. Rex: 2013’s Sleeper sounds remarkably similar to the Tyrannosaurus Rex–era, especially “Salamanda Palaganda,” which Ty covers here; Twins hits as hard as Electric Warrior; and Segall’s most recent full-length, Manipulator, is a fuzzy, wild ride like the whole of T. Rex’s output. With Ty Rex, it’s easy to see that connection isn’t lost on Segall.