Somewhat quietly, Doug Cowan’s band has stuck around long enough to become one of the Portland scene’s elder statesmen. Formed in 1997, they changed their name from Bully Pulpit so long ago that few probably remember they were ever anything other than the one-word collective Bullyclub. What’s that mean as they ready to release their third full-length album?
Well, says Cowan, “It’s hard to create a buzz again around ourselves.” Part of what excites any scene, he rightly notes, is what’s new. When you’ve been around for nine years, playing thoughtful, melodic indie pop the likes of which you won’t hear much on any radio station that isn’t run by a university, in a town of 60,000, with a wife and kids at home who make touring look fairly unattractive, you take what success you can get.
“Original bands,” says Cowan, “unless you have that huge buzz, you overuse your audience very quickly.” But it’s been consistent, it’s been taken seriously, and for the two albums Bullyclub have put out previously I’ve used words like “brainy” and “pretty damn cool.” “Nightmares are Good Things,” off 2003’s Tenderhooks, is still a song that I listen to often, if only for that one great notion that “Nightmares are good things that happen to you.”
Back then, Cowan was teaming with the prolific Jose Ayerve — of Spouse, a Spanish-only solo album, and the more recent Nuclear Waste Management Club. But he’s now gotten busy enough tour-managing and playing with the Pernice Brothers that’s he’s bid the Bullyclub adieu, other than guest spots on the brand-new Babbleluck’s “Heavier than Metal” and the Replacements cover, “Can’t Hardly Wait,” which for some reason I’ve never before connected with that fairly amusing Jennifer Love Hewitt movie of the same title.
But that 1990s paean to the likes of Sixteen Candles and Say Anything does share a sentiment with Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg’s “Jesus rides beside me/ Never buys any smokes” and Doug Cowan’s still urgent melancholy reflections on life’s bitter realities.
My new favorite comes in Babbleluck’s “Twice on Sunday”: “‘It’s the weekend,’ she says,/ ‘Do we have to be so old?’” That song also comes with a killer moment in the chorus refrain where Cowan bends his voice down in making “Sunday” a three-syllable word. Also here, I think the rhythm section — the very-crisp John Nunan on drums and Josh Denkmire on bass — is at its most interesting and active. For some reason, I’m reminded of Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut,” but that’s not very accurate as a musical reference.
If anything, I think I’d peg Bullyclub at some point plotted between Uncle Tupelo, Soul Asylum, and Red House Painters (which I guess would be similar to Golden Smog, the side project that features Tupelo’s Jeff Tweedy and Asylum’s Dan Murphy). This is the first impression, anyway, with “Assisted Living,” the new album’s opener and one of its strongest, with an introduction in a hurry to vocals immediate and high in the mix.
