#three bells

Consider, for instance, the shimmering jangle that kicks off the title track, Segall warbling plaintively over a mesh of folk-leaning guitar play . But the melody takes a half-step, jazzy turn, breaking out of what you expect into jazzier, more free form trajectories, but that’s just a taste. A mid-cut break slips further out into the stratosphere, quickening the pace, fracturing the vocals and layering heavy metal guitars with pristine folk-derived harmonies . It’ll remind you not just of Crimson, but related bands and their prog rock opuses—Yes’ “Roundabout” or Emerson Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man.” 

That’s quite a turnaround for an artist who cut his teeth on brief, incendiary garage stomps like “The Drag” but Segall’s influences have always been broader and deeper than skeptics acknowledge . He’s as deep into kraut rock as he is in mod 1960s psych, as committed to arena-style rock and metal as to Cavestomp primitives . His last few albums have thrived under limitations—no guitars for First Taste, a fixation on Harmonizers for Harmonizer, a home-taper’s acoustic fuzz for Hello, Hi .  Three Bells is not one of these conceptually defined albums . Recorded mostly solo, with Segall on guitar and drums, it pushes classic guitar rock into complicated corners, with choral motets sidling up to blistering guitar solos, noodle electric keyboard textures glittering atop blasts of pared down percussion .

Segall brought in his wife Denée to assist on five of these tracks, including the fuzz-bombed highlight “Eggman” where multiple guitars saw in from all angles as Segall chants in monotone . It’s hard to overstate how bouncy and marvelous the drumbeat is or how infectious this brutally stripped back song is .  And yet even this one disappears into a vortex, swamped by noise like the end of “A Day in the Life.” 

Emmett Kelley also played bass on a few . You can hear Kelley bobbing in and around the chilled, fusion jazz drum break of “Denée,” holding down an increasingly free-form exploration of rhythmic transport . Or grounding the swaggering Motown pop string section in the sweeping “My Room.”

The most entangled and intricate cut on this disc, though, is likely “Move” the one track credited not just to Segall but the whole Ty Segall Band (Ben Boye, Mikal Cronin, Emmett Kelly, Charles Moothart and Segall himself.)  Denée chants in a cool deadpan, as all manner of guitar-based ideas zing off in the background . The tempo changes—as well as the temperature, with metal and rock flaring out of krautish repetition—but the song bangs on . It’s complicated but in no way unreadable, a pleasure for all its multiplicity.