The rock and roll polymath Ty Segall and his scintillating band came to Webster Hall Monday night and ran the crowd ragged with a 90-plus-minute workout. They opened with the pairing of “The Bell” and “Void,” just as his latest release, Three Bells, does, nearly 15 minutes of nonstop churning of guitars, organ, bass and drums, Segall singing, “To realize, to be alive” as red lights bathed the stage. That first stretch found them evoking at times Pearl Jam, Metallica, Pink Floyd and Yes, featuring everyone in the band and creating a singular amalgam of rock for the giddy crowd.
The new record would be featured prominently all night, heavy and heavier, boot-stomp rhythms, but also music to dance to. “I Hear” was drenched in squealer guitar with an extended two-guitar outro. “Hi Dee Dee” was both clean and dirty, serrated-edge melody with Segall’s voice turning almost sweet. And later in the set, “My Best Friend,” with a contrasting sweetness, nearly funky with bubbles of bass floating up into the crowd.
Older Segall favorites found their place, fitting right into the setlist. “Love Fuzz,” off 2012’s Twins, was a highlight, the band exploring the limits with an extended section of depths-of-hell guitar dueling. “Looking at You,” off the more recent Hello, Hi album, was Segall at his most noodling, the band stopping on a dime and then restarted, finding a chaotic near-jazz that segued into the set-closing “Denée.” One more banger off the new record, a little more dancing, a spare two-guitar crescendo for those who hadn’t gotten their fill, just another night for Ty Segall. —A. Stein | @Neddyo
(Ty Segall plays Royale in Boston tomorrow night.)
Photos courtesy of Edwina Hay | thisisnotaphotograph.com
Ty Segall has never been shy about his affinity for King Crimson . His heaviest band, Fuzz, covered “21st Century Schizoid Man” a decade ago, amplifying its stately complexities to an airport tarmac roar . His latest album, the double LP Three Bells, hews to a quieter folky sound, but you can hear a homage to the prog godfathers in its tricky chord changes and multi-parted compositions.
Consider, for instance, the shimmering jangle that kicks off the title track, Segall warbling plaintively over a mesh of folk-leaning guitar play . But the melody takes a half-step, jazzy turn, breaking out of what you expect into jazzier, more free form trajectories, but that’s just a taste. A mid-cut break slips further out into the stratosphere, quickening the pace, fracturing the vocals and layering heavy metal guitars with pristine folk-derived harmonies . It’ll remind you not just of Crimson, but related bands and their prog rock opuses—Yes’ “Roundabout” or Emerson Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man.”
That’s quite a turnaround for an artist who cut his teeth on brief, incendiary garage stomps like “The Drag” but Segall’s influences have always been broader and deeper than skeptics acknowledge . He’s as deep into kraut rock as he is in mod 1960s psych, as committed to arena-style rock and metal as to Cavestomp primitives . His last few albums have thrived under limitations—no guitars for First Taste, a fixation on Harmonizers for Harmonizer, a home-taper’s acoustic fuzz for Hello, Hi . Three Bells is not one of these conceptually defined albums . 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 .
Segall brought in his wife Denée to assist on five of these tracks, including the fuzz-bombed highlight “Eggman” where multiple guitars saw in from all angles as Segall chants in monotone . It’s hard to overstate how bouncy and marvelous the drumbeat is or how infectious this brutally stripped back song is . And yet even this one disappears into a vortex, swamped by noise like the end of “A Day in the Life.”
Emmett Kelley also played bass on a few . You can hear Kelley bobbing in and around the chilled, fusion jazz drum break of “Denée,” holding down an increasingly free-form exploration of rhythmic transport . Or grounding the swaggering Motown pop string section in the sweeping “My Room.”
The most entangled and intricate cut on this disc, though, is likely “Move” the one track credited not just to Segall but the whole Ty Segall Band (Ben Boye, Mikal Cronin, Emmett Kelly, Charles Moothart and Segall himself.) Denée chants in a cool deadpan, as all manner of guitar-based ideas zing off in the background . The tempo changes—as well as the temperature, with metal and rock flaring out of krautish repetition—but the song bangs on . It’s complicated but in no way unreadable, a pleasure for all its multiplicity.
Hello from Vermont, USA. I’ve been rereading basically everything you have up on AO3, as one does. Having just finished Three Bells, I’m curious if there are any ideas about how rebuilding a younger community would go for them? Or what the other schools will do when they hear that Wolves have Grasses again? Will remaining witchers all come together as a reunited group to train the new kids in different techniques so they all have little brothers again?
Hello in Vermont!
Honestly, I suspect answering all of those questions is why Gweld's Three Bells fic is giving me such trouble. How do the scattered remnants of the witcher Schools react to having the possibility of new trainees? How can the Schools be reintegrated into an Order again, or is that even possible? Who's even left?
And is what happened to Voltehre going to happen to anyone else?
Sorry if we're getting greedy now, but the thought of a Vesemir Three Bells sequel makes me wonder ... does any of the Gweld Three Bells story exist beyond the little ending teaser of the original Three Bells fic? (Apologies if it was in your WIP list, having trouble locating your original post)
The Gweld WIP is fighting me hard enough that I've restarted it half a dozen times now, I'm afraid. I think I need a better handle on his relationship with Geralt & Eskel, and theirs with each other. Having their friendship be a platonic one that's still bone-deep might be the way to go, come to think of it.
Oh no! The potential Three Bells sequel...if the formula holds, someone else thought the exact same thing and died! So, if you're willing to share, who had the same thought, exactly fifty years earlier, to the day and the hour and the ticking second? :-D
*slightly evil grin*
Well, I'm setting this fifty years (to the day and hour and the ticking second) after the sacking of Kaer Morhen.
(Rennes. It's Rennes. He's having a very bad time.)
