Ty Segall’s Three Bells puts freedom ahead of genres and styles
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
One trope among all music writing, or music criticism, is the insatiable need to categorize everything into specific styles and genres, and thusly criticize and compartmentalize therein, filing it all away with the smug, self-righteous sense of a job well done.
As much as that shouldn’t be the case with music (general descriptions are fine, hard-and-fast categories help no one), it certainly shouldn’t apply to Ty Segall. For an artist who makes as many records as he does, firm categorization isn’t fitting. He’s back with Three Bells, churning out 15 more songs that melds textures with one ear 50 years in the past and another firmly set to the future.
Is it retro? Is it modern? I don’t know, but I know it all sounds incredible.
It’s a mostly one-man show, with drop-ins from close confidants throughout. But for the bulk of the album, Segall is doing what he wants on guitar, drums, bass and vocals. Even in a primarily acoustic setting, the songs have a drive and a kick that give the album an urgency that pushes it well away from a folk setting. He has a way of making sure his stripped-down compositions have just as much frantic energy as his full-out electric excursions.
On “I Hear,” those psychedelic sirens just grabs listeners by the throat, slowly dragging them down into Segall’s noise-filled lunacy. A dissonant anti-solo on “Eggman” ties a bow on a song that seems to slowly disintegrate inside of the stereo image. Somehow this all flows so well into “My Room” that it feels like a magic trick. That track in particular might be a solid place to look if this is all an entirely new experience, with all the elements of his fuzzed-out point-of-view merging nicely.
Again, his guitar work is so singular and defined, it’s hard to imagine anyone else making a record quite like this. And all these angular, psychedelic freak-outs give way to pulsing, acid-soaked funk on “Denée.” It’s as if there’s no sonic limit, but everything sounds of a piece, even with all these divergent songs and parts smashed together.
It’s been a decade since I finally discovered him on Manipulator, which was already his eighth album amid a number of other projects along the way. But the consistency and prolificacy of his output has been remarkable. He seems to just work and work and crank this stuff out, strengthened by ability to bend genres on a whim. And there’s a depth to all of it that’s hard to define.
Now, about styles. The “retro” label gets applied liberally to anything that might work a fuzz pedal on a solo, but that misses the point here. Listen to those choppy leads and double-tracked choruses on “Hi Dee Dee,” and it’s a sound that’s just unmistakably Segall. Yes, some bands did that kind of thing in the 1960s and ’70s. But those sounds never fully disappeared, nor should they just because they were first recognized in a particular decade. They become options on the palette. And Segall is more than adept at applying any and all of these particular quirks into his records.
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com