With a head of long, ruffled blond hair and a big baggy t-shirt, Bully’s Alicia Bognanno certainly looks the part of the classic grunger. Which is appropriate because Bully’s sound is an affectionate send-up to nineties alt-rock, married with the instant melodies of indie-pop, making they’re debut Feels Like which came out earlier this year something of a critical smash.
 
Bully start fast and don’t take a moment of pause until they’ve surged all the way to the end, meaning the whole thing feels like it lasted about 15 minutes, despite playing most of their album plus a couple of covers. Large parts of the show are played without break, the band immediately launching into the next song on the set list with smooth and effortless transitions. The show begins with a killer run of album opener ‘I Remember’ followed ‘Too Tough’ and ‘Brainfreeze’. The relentlessness makes for a powerful beginning, sending a jolt into the crowd’s slow Monday evening. The middle section of the show: ‘Trying’, ‘Trash’ and ‘Six’ is even more pulverising, the tempo and intensity slowly increasing across the tracks to create a kind of medley of room-filling riffs and a rising franticness in their playing.
 
Bognanno’s voice is even more impressive. On record it’s already an attention grabbing hoarse cry, but live, like in the chorus of ‘Trash’, it’s transformed into a guttural roar. Made even more powerful when compared to the quiet, unassuming and almost nasally voice she has when talking to the crowd between songs. She’s chatty, but seems slightly despondent at a fairly stationary crowd and seems almost about to comment on this at one point, but decides better of it.
 
Their set ends with a cover of the Butthole Surfers classic ‘Who Was in My Room Last Night’, turning the original nutty, psych freak-out into a tighter, more streamlined song. The raggedy punk tempo moves into a doomy, half time breakdown towards the end, which sounds absolutely amazing. Whilst Bully excels at poppy, immediate grungy numbers, there isn’t much variation in pacing and tone in tonight’s set. If this is an indicator of the direction the band is heading, expanding the palette of their sound, then it points to a very exciting future.
Louis Ormesher
Photos: Tom Barlow Brown