Three Bells

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.

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.

You don’t need to be a Ty Segall fan to appreciate the magic of Three Bells, the artist has transcended any persona attached to him to pen some of his best music to date.

This double LP has sonic coherence across 65 minutes of taut, sinewy but ever-unpredictable compositions, with a subtly altered sound palette. [Feb 2024, p.86]

He can still shred with the best of them (Wait, Hi Dee Dee, Watcher), but across this hour-plus album he revels in upending expectations, whether through abrupt tonal shifts (To You's new age synth excursions, Void's trippy synth hits), fried-metal no-wave (The Bell), or even a regular rocker that could pass for early Radiohead (Reflections).

It’s an ambitious, uncanny, joyously unpredictable album that invites you to get lost within its house-of-mirrors design.

“The Bell” and “Void” take Ty Segall’s listener on an extensive and restless ride in just the first 12 minutes of this 65-minute whopper. The album smooths out a little after that, settling in for 13 more tracks that don’t stray far from what Segall knows and does best.

A careful listen reveals he's not shy about constructing a pousse café of six-string textures, but he's smart enough to know when to reign himself in, and most of the time Three Bells sound admirably open and dynamic, leaving just enough daylight between the overdubs to allow each to have some personality of its own.