Print Edition: July 1, 2015
Bully
Feels Like
Teeming with energy, Feels Like, the debut record by Nashville-based four-piece Bully, is an energetic assault on the ears. Filled with dynamic melodies, pounding drums, blistering guitar lines and punchy bass, Feels Like leans strongly on traditional grunge, punk, and new wave elements; throughout the record, it’s easy to hear influences of Nirvana, early Weezer, and Joy Division.
Now, there are a million bands that hearken back to the sounds of these titans of grunge and new wave, but Bully is different; what strongly separates Feels Like from other releases in this genre is the vocal work and charisma of lead singer, guitarist, and producer Alicia Bognanno. Her delivery can be as crass and direct as her lyrics, such as on “I Remember,” where she barks, “I remember getting too fucked up / I remember throwing up in your car,” or light, like on the beginning of tracks such as “Sharktooth” and “Trying.”
Bognanno’s raw charisma bleeds out of your audio speakers in a way that makes it sound like you are actually in the room experiencing the performance. Best of all is that in a world where our amount of free time seems to be dwindling, this album clocks in at just over a half an hour, which isn’t that much of a commitment. Believe me, you’re going to want to sit down and listen to this record over and over again.
The Courtneys
The Courtneys
The Courtneys are Jen Twynn Payne, Sydney Koke, and Courtney Loove — a punchy trio from Vancouver. Their self-titled album could be the soundtrack to a ‘90s teen movie, where good-looking Californian high-schoolers pile into a Jeep and speed to the coast. The only problem is that the movie would only be this one scene running over and over as each song sounds exactly like the last. This is the album: a continuously driving beat, but it never arrives at the beach.
As I was listening, I didn’t notice when one song changed to the next, as the drums, vocals, and guitar were the same tone, tempo, and timbre as the last. The music is upbeat and fun, and great to have in the background while you’re cleaning the house or sweating in a hot hatchback on your way to a seashore of sorts. But if you’re looking for something to help you get through a long day or for something to cheer you up, this might not be the album. Despite the trendy song titles (like “Insufficient Funds” or “90210”), the lyrics don’t have a lot of emotional or poetic significance — mostly because the vocals are so heavily distorted that you can’t hear them. I’m looking forward to checking out the band at Jam in Jubilee this summer, but I wouldn’t put their album on repeat.
Róisín Murphy
Hairless Toys
Róisín Murphy’s first albm in eight years, Hairless Toys, seems to have been conceived and executed with the goal of eccentric genius. Five weeks of closeted composing (“for hour upon hour with Eddie [Stevens, producer] adding more synths, some percussion, a bit of guitar, and editing on the fly”) last winter, according to Murphy’s bio, resulted in 30 songs, which were narrowed to the eight tracks of Hairless Toys.
But instead of eccentric genius, most of the album feels random and unfocused. In many cases the instrumentals seem thrown together, and the lyrics are unspectacular. For such a peculiarly titled album, I expected something more concrete, but the words are nearly all abstract (vague) and trapped in a rhyme scheme that doesn’t match the strived-for eclectic feel.
The third track, “Exploitation,” is nearly 10 minutes long, and while it might be sort of at home as background music to a Devil Wears Prada-esque afterparty, the verses disappear in the overly repetitive chorus: “who’s exploiting who” in variations, over and over.
The exception is “House of Glass,” which is intended to be autobiographical, and it shows. The drum beats and use of synth have more focus as a backdrop, and there’s also a more successful weaving in of eclectic instrumentals, trills, and vocal layering, giving the track a balance of cohesion and uniqueness the rest of the album doesn’t quite reach.
Fight Like Apes
Fight Like Apes
Fight Like Apes are a guitar-less rock band from Dublin with Mary-Kate Geraghty leads on vocals and synth — and sure, everyone’s using synths, everyone, but crucially, Fight Like Apes is not a band interested in nostalgia, or sounding like an era other than their own, which they write as a world made up of pub conversations, paragraph-long text messages, and screaming subconscious. Where Taylor Swift pens a note about what it means to find a shirt, Fight Like Apes burn the shirt, the house, the neighbour’s lawn, and then stop to consider what it means to still be doing this at 29.
If their last album (The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner) was life in hell, their self-titled third album is purgatory; it’s their most polished LP, but no less full of fatalistic love and freakouts. At times, with their careful building of production elements and subtext-heavy lyrics (with occasionally cheerful backing crowds), Fight Like Apes sounds a bit like the New Pornographers, but less old and pleased with themselves and life in general.
And just because Geraghty (and Jamie Fox, who is mostly background here, adding vocals on just one song, still sounding like he’s singing after falling down the stairs or under a table) is capable of projecting a wild image, doesn’t mean there aren’t songs to contrast, or moments where the rush subsides long enough to grasp at clarity: “She said more than she meant to,” Geraghty opens the album, which is less a moment of guilt than a mission statement.
