Bully – Sugaregg

I swear, my ability to lie to myself is just extraordinary. I keep telling myself I’m going to make some headway on this list, catching up with records I’ve bought in the past couple of years, and then get back into the alphabetical review of my collection. And all I have to do to move forward is to listen to the next record I need to write about, record like three thoughts, and move on. But the problem is: I keep buying more records, and I want to listen to those. Not the ones I bought a few months or a year ago.

So I wrote about Bully’s “Lucky For You,” and all I had to do to keep this project moving was say a tiny bit about the previous Bully album, “Sugaregg,” whatever that means, and – nope. Instead I bought a small pile of records when we visited Syracuse (The Sound Garden), and then another small pile of records from Forever Changes when we got back home, and I’ve been completely wrapped up in those.

So tonight, I got to listen to “Sugaregg.” I love the sound, I love the post-punk feel, love Alicia Bognanno’s voice. I have to admit that, like Speedy Ortiz, so many people talk about the brilliance and relatability of the lyrics – and they may well be. But I get kinda wrapped up in the sound of it all and, admittedly, don’t play it very loud most of the time, and with the overall submersion of the vocals in the mix (to good effect), I often don’t have a lot of sense of what’s going on, lyrically. I hear the angst, I hear the anger, I hear more than that, but it’s coming across in the feeling more than the words for me.

But it’s a great screamy album, to be played right alongside Speedy Ortiz, right alongside The Worriers.

Bought this 2020 release last October, after I fell for “Lucky.”