Skip to main content

Sara Bug – Sara Bug (2021)

Sara Bug – Sara Bug

Sara Bug opens her debut album simply enough, with a hushed vocal melody and some understated guitar strumming. It evokes the solitude of an artistic debut, while framing Bug as the star of the show. But gradually “Die With You” build itself up to include a full arrangement of strings and electric guitar, never overcoming Bug’s personality or her melancholy but instead charting the growth of the song from it’s humble beginnings to its place at the head of the table.

“Die With You’ dates back to 2013, a rumination on young love and Bug’s need for approval at that time, it’s place on her debut eight years later, serving to repurpose that same message. Much like the song’s sonic development from an acoustic ballad to a full, lush arrangement, the message doesn’t show Bug relying on anyone else, but instead giving us a solo, self-titled album.

Bug is based out of Nashville, Tennessee, and as expected her back-up on the album is first rate. Besides playing the bulk of the instruments herself, Bug enlists multi-instrumentalists Bennet Littlejohn and J. Gardner along with Bassist Christian Baraks to fill out the rest. The group sounds like a collection of old pros, loose enough to match Bug’s naivete charm but tight enough to give the album the weight that it needs.

Without it, Sara Bug could easily come off as slight, a singer-songwriter who’s pretty good at singing and pretty good at songwriting but eternally bound to make subpar bedroom pop. Bug, instead, emerges fully formed, honing a sound that even at its most conventional, finds ways off squeezing in a little personality. “Ride on Sundy” and “Rosebank” for instance, both ostensibly about Bug’s motorcycle, use their motif to pick at the album’s themes of isolation and rejuvenation, respectively.

Sara Bug represents the end of seven years of writing and struggling artistically for the singer, a period that featured Bug growing to become more mature, more successful and more confident. “Lotta Pride”, one of her strongest moments on the album, finds a way to squeeze a concise pop song full of dejection and wit into less than a minute and a half. Bug runs through the death of her aunt and simultaneously the death of her life in New York City before returning home to her family. Fittingly, her Nashville twang is on full display here, as is her sense of humor, shrugging off her aspirations and goals in favor of spending more time with her brother, something that only seems like the right decision in hindsight.

Likewise, “Beholder” fits a lot of exposition into a short, little track. Coming in towards the end of the album, it covers much of the same themes as “Die With You” while at the same time negating the entire purpose of the opening track. Bug has fessed up that despite everything that’s happened since she wrote “Die With You” she still cares very much what people think, but at least she’s willing to admit it. Maybe the important part is, this time, it’s not her boyfriend she’s worried about.

If there’s one major drawback to Bug’s debut it’s the inclusion of “Back In Nashville”. The would-be bonus track, Bug’s attempt at making a cheesy country song, works a little too well, feeling detached and out of place amongst her more personal work. “Back In Nashville” is a testament to her versatility, especially on an album that focuses so much on personality but ultimately that’s the problem. A track that would have worked great as a one-off single, ends up complicating a more concise concept and sticking out like a sore thumb.

Maybe that’s the point, after all Bug spends most of the album presenting a changing version of herself, one that seems to mature and grow by each passing song. By the end of the album even Bug seems to have grown tired of the concept she made for herself. Regardless, the greatest strengths on Sara Bug are readily apparent, and as far as breezy, mini albums go, this collection of songs, strewn together from almost a decade of personal anguish and development, sounds effortless. Bug may need to prove just how accomplished she is on future releases, but for now, she has defined herself well, and that’s all you can ask from a self-titled album.

~7.5 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert Review: Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23

Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23 Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood was once the center of the city’s booming entertainment district. Located at what had initially been the end of the L Train system, The Aragon Ballroom, Green Mill Jazz Club, and long-defunct Uptown Theatre quickly defined the corners of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the designated area for Chicagoans to congregate for the arts. As the area’s zeitgeist waivered though, the theatres grew into a weekend oasis of vibrancy amongst an otherwise casual and sleepy north-side neighborhood. Given Wilco’s consistent championing of Chicago’s local institutions, and another Uptown landmark Carol’s Pub in particular, The Rivera Theater seems like exactly the kind of venue for the band to host their latest three-night run and the start of their spring tour. Jeff Tweedy and company know the former movie palace well, playing there many times over the years and even using it as the base for a five-night series of performances b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain (2023)

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain   Big Thief, one of the best and most adept bands of the 21 st century, has done more in six short years than most bands can squeeze out of an entire catalog. Each of their five studio albums has managed to expand their signature homespun charm into exciting, self-contained albums. The sound always moves forward but with distinct detours projecting their country-folk and singer-songwriter tendencies over disparate palates. The band’s prolificity extends to their solo catalog as well, the most notable inclusions naturally coming from lead singer and principal songwriter Adrianne Lenker. But behind her eclipsing generational talent, is guitarist Buck Meek, an artist who could easily shepherd his own headlining band if he needed to. Aside from some early, Big Thief-adjacent work, Meek’s true breakout was with 2021’s Two Saviors , a beautiful, alt-country collection of songs, most of which approached the quality, if not the scale of his mother band’s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (2023)

Fever Ray – Radical Romantics Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout , an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right. Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensi...
Post a Comment
Read more