Photo Credit: Andrew Penkalski
It’s got to be stressful for Bully to live up to their press kit while on the road. Thus far, the Nashville band has usually been discussed through the lens of frontwoman Alicia Bognanno’s early music engineering interests in suburban Minnesota or her more résumé-worthy internship at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago. It’s not the sort of pedigree that a band needs to get kids out to shows when you’re just tearing through a 45-minute set of throbbing ’90s punk. But it’s still one that stirs an “I gotta see this” attitude when Bully goes on record saying that their debut album, next month’s Feels Like, strives for a headphone sound that matches their stage show. Bully’s Thursday night Cactus Club set proved this wasn’t bullshit.
The group opened with one of their most recently released (and shortest) songs, “I Remember,” a trachea-wasting holler of lousy memories from Bognanno—think Kim Shattuck of The Muffs shouting to a Nirvana-sized crowd. It’s a song that quickly accomplishes everything Bully is great at, so it made sense when the whole thing played as a sound check. After wrapping the tune, Bognanno did the one-time adjustment to the soundboard by telling the house that she only needs vocals and kick drum in her monitor and nothing else.
Interestingly enough, the older tracks played more to their technical strengths than the newer ones did. Feels Like single “Trying” let Bognanno’s hyper-introspective lyrics take up more of the stage than the band. Last year’s equally Liz Phair-ish “Sharktooth” offered a way looser playground for guitarist Clayton Parker and drummer Stewart Copeland to swing from. That’s not meant to undercut Bognanno’s songwriting. Bully could easily feel like genre fodder without the “loaded questions” that round out her songs. Still, these few occasions where she slunk away from the front microphone to fan her bleached-out Cobain hair across her pedal-gazing bandmates were welcome moments.
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After a lean, barely one-hour set, the crowd solicited one last track out of them, and according to Bognanno, it was the only other song they knew how to play. It was a cover of The Replacements’ “Left of the Dial.” The closer felt a little languid—not because of Bully, but because it played to a remarkably thinner crowd than Milwaukee’s consistently fantastic Whips had the pleasure of wearing out an hour earlier. Several concertgoers were vocalizing how they saw what they came to see as they motioned for the exit mid-show. No matter. It probably goes without saying that Bully will bust that cover out again when they open for Best Coast in Minneapolis on June 8. And if the crowd’s not any more enthused, it will at least hopefully be closer to a size that Bully deserves.
