A fifteen song cycle that takes a journey to the center of the self. Ty's been on this kind of trip before, so he's souped up a vehicle that's all his own - a sophisticated machine - to take us there this time. The conception of Three Bells arcs, rainbow-like, into a land nearly beyond songs - but inside of them, Ty relentlessly pushes the walls further and further in his writing and playing to cast light into the most opaque depths. Three Bells kind of goes beyond songs. The fifteen of them work together as a mosaic, creating the larger work at the same time as they stand on their own. Composing the album as a piece, Ty formed certain chord shapes over and over again, making thematic material that each song moves through in its own way, building a claustrophobic/paranoia vibe, cycling bold thrusts forward into ego deaths, the one-step-forward, two-steps-back patterns framing an overriding ask: what we can do to get past the back-and-forth conversation, to arrive at a place of acceptance. Three Bells takes Ty Segall's trips so much deeper and farther than they've gone before "" a masterpiece of personal expression, expressed through words, music and production, parabolically addressing malaise with compassion in a flowing, unstoppable hour-plus of intoxicating sound.
