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The new album from Ty Segall opens with the Californian psych-rock obsessive walking in circles. “Round and round,” he repeats in a dreamy flower-child voice. How to break free? The song’s answer is entirely characteristic. It consists of an accelerated outbreak of riffage and drumming, his equivalent of the trumpets of Jericho.
Segall is from the three-chords-and-the-truth school of punk enlightenment. His guitar-playing actually involves more than those fabled three chords: he is an agile and imaginative musician. But he draws inspiration from the clamorous end of the sonic map, where fuzz pedals and monstrous distortion lie. Now releasing the 15th studio album of a recording career that also includes a dizzying array of collaborations and spin-off bands, he brings monkish zeal and auteur-like artistry to the often dusty world of retro-garage rock.
Three Bells shows signs of being worked on more thoroughly than the albums that used to pour forth from him in profusion. It lasts 65 minutes and arrives two years after its predecessor, Hello, Hi. Songs head off in odd directions, like the way “To You” switches between intensely driven rhythms and the chaotic sounds of something collapsing. But the 15 tracks sit together more coherently than 2018’s similarly lengthy Freedom’s Goblin.
“Wait” opens with delicate acoustic guitar and Segall singing lyrics suggestive of an acid trip that is about to go awry. “Wait, before I go insane,” he chants in a frazzled Syd Barrett voice: “Just reach out and touch my face.” Groundedness is provided by the comfortingly heavy sound of an electric guitar. A more switched-on Segall sings about going to “the place where the music’s louder”.
This, in a nutshell, is his credo. It sounds simple, but considerable ingenuity is deployed to elucidate it. The clashing riffs of “Eggman” trade blows back and forth in binaural audio, as though from ear to ear. “Denée” has a jazz drumbeat and hypnotic electronic keyboard vamps. Even when matters get particularly far-out, like the psychedelic odyssey of “Void”, a serpentine groove carries us along. The song ends with Segall having an epiphany about truth amid a guitar wig-out. What else?
★★★★☆
‘Three Bells’ is released by Drag City
