Ty Segall: Three Bells Album Assessment

However Three Bells isn’t only a cruise by Segall’s document assortment. The album opens with two multi-sectional prog-folk epics—“The Bell” and “Void”—that apply the battle plan of his madcap 2017 medley “Heat Fingers (Freedom Returned)” to extra mystical realms, dialing up the delirium with every new melodic fragment and sudden tempo shift. That is rock’n’roll as an M.C. Escher portray—a stability of progressive engineering and disorienting up-is-down logic. However for all their twists and turns, “The Bell” and “Void” clearly lay out the thematic terrain that Segall explores all through Three Bells: the everlasting pressure between looking for inside peace whereas buckling beneath exterior pressures. On the country power-pop reverie “My Room,” he admits: “On the market, I’m too dizzy/I’d slightly be inside my room,” however because the music’s electric-guitar hooks get sharper, nastier, and extra intrusive, he appears to acknowledge the impossibility of absolutely tuning out.

Segall’s prescription for sanity is to attract power from those he loves: his pets, sure, however most notably his spouse. On Three Bells, the Lennon affect is as a lot matrimonial as musical: Whereas Denée has turned up in Segall’s work earlier than (together with of their robo-punk venture the C.I.A.), with this document, she turns into the muse and inventive co-conspirator who’s fully enmeshed in his artwork, and the agent provocateur pushing it to new levels of uncooked carnality. As singer and lyricist, she delivers her concept of a love music with “Transfer,” a brash proto-metal boogie by which she reveals the couple’s secret to emphasize reduction: “After we are sideways/I disconnect the telephone/It’s totally different within the morning/After we’re alone.”

In contrast, Segall addresses his higher half with pure reverence. “To You” begins as a portrait of touring-induced homesickness coloured by manic folk-punk strums and ping-ponging synths, however when he declares, “I’m coming again to you,” the music melts right into a swooning, faux-symphonic serenade. And towards the top of this lengthy, labyrinthine album, Segall affords up Three Bells’ climactic set piece, “Denée,” whose title constitutes its lone lyric. However whereas it initially sounds as if Segall is laying down an ad-hoc placeholder vocal, he retains repeating her identify till it blossoms right into a devotional mantra, which bursts open into an prolonged cosmic-jazz jam that’s in contrast to the rest in his bottomless canon. It might not be an outwardly sentimental “Oh Yoko!”-style serenade, however “Denée” isn’t any much less direct a paean to the transcendental energy of a love that leaves you confused.