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Album Of The Week

Album Of The Week: Bully Feels Like

4:38 PM EDT on June 23, 2015

Bully - Feels Like

Bully – Feels Like

From a distance, Nashville's indie rock music scene seems like some magical lost world where young people still party to fuzzed-up, guitar-driven rock music. If you've been to a major music festival anytime in the past few years, you'll know that this is a true anomaly. If you get a few tens of thousands of kids together in a field, and if those kids get properly fucked up, they are not going to gravitate toward the stages that have people playing guitars on them. They are going to gravitate to the dance DJs, or the rappers, or maybe especially the rappers who rap over dance music, and the people with guitars are going to be in tents, off to the side, playing to sparse crowds of a few hundred true believers. But in Nashville, things are different. Diarrhea Planet are all drunken classic-rock guitar overdrive, with four different guitarists taking turns soloing, or soloing all at the same time, seeing who can bring more hair-flipping style to what they do. JEFF The Brotherhood front like heshers but knock out shockingly polished and melodic fuzz-pop gems that beg for cheap-beer coolers and innertubes and the backyard swimming pools of neighbors who are away on vacation. Colleen Green comes from California but went to Nashville to record with Diarrhea Planet and JEFF The Brotherhood dudes, and she left town with the best power-pop album in years. And then there's Bully, who don't necessarily make party-rock but whose rock seems informed by spending time at parties. They crank out plainspoken rock songs about being young and living in squalor and going through pivotal life moments. They're great enough at it that they went from being a DIY Bandcamp band to one releasing a debut album on a major label less in less than a year, and they're tough enough that they made sure their major-label debut sounds just as noisy as their Bandcamp releases. And that album, Feels Like, is the sort of thing that can renew your faith in rock music as a cultural enterprise.