You don’t need me to tell you California garage rock giant Ty Segall is a hyper-prolific musician. You already know that. The man’s incredible productivity as a songwriter and recording artist—and his seemingly bottomless discography—show up in the first paragraph of anything written about him, and they’ll show up in the first paragraph of his obituary someday, unless it turns out he’s immortal.
More interesting than the sheer volume of music Segall has released over the past 15 years—as a solo artist, collaboratively with buds such as Mikal Cronin and Tim “White Fence” Presley and as part of bands like Fuzz, The Traditional Fools, GØGGS and The C.I.A.—is the trip he has been on since 2019. That’s when Segall started setting limitations on his projects and treating albums as stylistic experiments. First, he put down his guitars and used more exotic stringed instruments to make the folky First Taste. Then, he went synth-heavy (and enlisted Bitchin Bajas’ Cooper Crain as co-producer) for 2021’s excellent Harmonizer. And last year, he put out a home-recorded acoustic album, Hello, Hi, that spills over with introspection and beautiful vocal harmonies.
Now, it’s a new year, and another Ty Segall release is upon us. Three Bells is the sound of the guy’s creative pendulum swinging back in the other direction, away from the relative restraint and restrictions of the past few years and toward exploration, sprawl, boundless ideation, knotty arrangements and good ol’ freaky rock ‘n’ roll. At 15 tracks and 66 minutes long, it’s Segall’s longest effort since 2018’s ambitiously epic double album, Freedom’s Goblin, and his second-longest solo release, period.
There’s a reason for that: Over and over again, the tunes on Three Bells twist and turn, chasing ideas around corners, zigging when you expect them to zag and vice versa. In “The Bell,” for example, the rhythm shifts on a dime several times as the song evolves from gently woozy to a galloping buzzsaw and Segall introduces the album’s central concept: A journey to the center of the self. “To realize / To be alive / The point where we begin and die / There is no separation / My three bells, inside,” he sings.
What exactly do the three bells represent? No idea, but the journey has begun. “Void” is the longest track on the album, hovering in increasingly chaotic suspended animation for more than three minutes before resolving into an easygoing groove and then a fuzzy final section that provides one of Three Bells’ peaks. “I Hear” sounds like a disco record slowed down by a stack of nickels on the label, and “Hi Dee Dee” recalls Beck’s early-career experiments—like if Mellow Gold-era Beck made Midnite Vultures instead of mid-career Beck. Not until we get to “My Best Friend” do we encounter anything that resembles a three-minute chunk of catchy garage-rock—which is great! It’s wonderful to have Ty Segall back in a mode where he’s throwing stuff at a wall, seeing what sticks and then melting that wall down into a funky molten goo.
The rest of Three Bells contains some of the record’s most distinctive moments: The flickering undulations of “Reflections”; the collision of spastic prog-funk and proto-punk in “Move”; hearing “Eggman” and suddenly knowing what it would sound like if David Bowie was trapped in a funhouse mirror; a case of whiplash caused by the dizzying “To You”; the extended math-jazz jam in “Denée,” named after Segall’s wife, who co-wrote five songs on the album. Sitting there in the middle of all this oddity is “My Room,” an easy, breezy jangle-pop hymn for our overwhelming times: “Out there it’s too busy,” Segall sings. “It’s easier inside my room.” Indeed, we are all better off when Ty Segall is holed up somewhere with a handful of instruments, a head full of ideas and a way to document how they interact. What Three Bells gives us is more than an hour of his musical stream of consciousness roaming wild and free—the results are unpredictable, imperfect and utterly fascinating.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Follow him on your social media platform of choice at @bcsalmon.
