Bully's Sugaregg: A Record Review

The following was written as a dual review with my friend Kelly Minnis, who merely liked the new Bully record.

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I heard Bully for the first time while playing YouTube jukebox with Kelly Minnis in my living room. We were swapping the TV remote, slamming beers because I still did, and he says, “Ah, yes. You like female vocals.” Then he played the video for “Running” from Bully’s sophomore album Losing. The recommendation took. I owned Losing less than a week later.

The thing I instantly liked about Losing was the nostalgia it contained. The album felt a time-capsule of 90s sensibilities. The production. The muted, twisted guitars and trigger-thumpy bass lines. Bognanno’s riot grrrl vocals. Even the video for “Running” (minus the cell-phones) looks like something that would make a young Noah Baumbach lose sleep. Losing feels like a love-letter to a bygone, younger era. It’s a solid record, one I turn to when it’s too hot for a flannel AND a cardigan but I still don’t want to give a Gen-X level shit. It’s quaint in a pissy kinda way. And for this reason, I really like Losing.

But late this summer Alicia Bognanno released a single -- “Every Tradition” -- under the Bully moniker that sounded and felt different from Bully’s prior work. I didn’t know what was going on here, but Bognanno’s voice held a new texture, and not in the mix. There was a story here. A confession. Lines about “pressure to have a baby when I don’t want one in my body” and “disassociation with every tradition” tipped me off that this lady was refitting herself, via her music, into solidly chosen spaces. I was intrigued. I preordered Sugaregg from Bandcamp that day.

More singles. “Where to Start” features layers of tender to hollered pop sensibilities that swirl grizzled choruses around candied verses. It’s slightly angry but mostly fun. “Prism” slips in like a sleepy Sunday morning. Bognanno sings from beneath the covers, peeking through the doorway into rooms she’s working up courage to enter about “just a mess tied in sheets and covered in tears” and “your ghost in my kitchen”. It’s damn-near cheesy, deliciously so. However, it was, and still is, “Hours and Hours” that ruined me in my pre-release listens. There’s that classic Bully bass intro. Signature vocals that begin soft, then peel back the lid, only to crawl back under, and then peel open full vulgar again. “Hours and Hours / Nothing stands up / Feels like it took a lifetime / Man, I’m sick of this stuff . . . But I’m not angry anymore / I’m not holding onto that.” I don’t know Bognanno’s story here, but I know mine: weary of so much deconstructive psychobabble that holds back truth. Praise be -- this song felt anthemic at just the right time.

My blurb for Sugaregg on Bandcamp reads, “Bully's first two records rock aplenty, and years in still deliver. But SUGAREGG is an emotional juggernaut on the upswing - Bognanno's guitar-and-holler psalmody of uncouth prayer. I'm glad for it. Amen and hell yeah. Favorite track: Hours and Hours.” Sugaregg feels chock full of feels to me. It’s an emotive testament, more than Losing or even its predecessor Feels Like. Bognanno admitted in interviews to the confessional nature of this album, to the solo writing and recording of it, to the devil-may-care let-it-all-hang-out personal and professional captured-in-process rough draftiness of it all. Referring to Sugaregg as my AOTY thus far (a fruitless claim to those unaware of its contenders), I refer to feeling these things in the record, to its “emotional juggernaut” aspect and the way it feels like secularist prayer. Putting on this record, for me, dims the lights and pulls the shades. Bognanno made a record here that draws hidden bits of me out of bed and into open spaces, bits even I’m not ready to dance with. But that’s the power of a woman unafraid of her process or her art. And that’s why I love this Sugaregg.