Loud and quiet, harmony and dissonance, soft and heavy: rock music has long mined thrills from binary juxtaposition – but it was grunge that sharpened a sonic contrast into a generic calling card. Thirty years after the fact, Minnesota’s Alicia Bognanno is still tinkering with the era’s dynamics: her work is built from the interplay between melodious guitar lines and roars of primal pain, between honeyed crooning and brutal shredding. Never unpleasantly grating, never cloyingly sweet, it’s a watertight formula – as well as an extremely well-worn one.
What prevents Sugaregg – Bully’s third album, and Bognanno’s first as a totally solo entity – from feeling like a period piece is that the retro approach isn’t exclusively put to the service of buoyant, indelible tunes (although the record is teeming with them, the apparently Chumbawamba-inspired Where to Start being particularly irresistible). Instead, Bognanno uses this mercurial mode to record her experiences with bipolar disorder. The theme leads to another set of opposites surfacing in the lyrics, a series of starkly frank psychological insights that are at once coldly analytical and wildly evocative. “I felt so high / Could’ve took my life, couldn’t tell you why”, she recalls on the very Pixies-esque Like Fire, while on Come Down she raspingly relates the impulse to “peel my skin off, hit the ground” over ambling guitars. Bognanno may be continuing a great tradition, but it provides a framework for catharsis that is deeply personal and candour that feels truly progressive.
