In the wake of her 2022 singer-songwriter album Conversations With My Other Voice, Grammy-winning singer-guitarist Buick Audra found loose thematic ends that needed tying up. She was also still coping with the 2020 death of Marc Orleans (Sunburned Hand of the Man, Spore, Enos Slaughter), who was a friend early in her career. To sort out the cathartic truths, she turned to Friendship Commanders, her heavy-rock duo with drummer Jerry Roe, and made Mass, their new LP out Friday.
“I don’t think I chose,” Audra says when asked about her message’s medium. “I think the songs presented themselves with certain riffs and musical sensibilities, and I knew it was Friendship Commanders from the outset. The first couple of songs I wrote for the record — there’s a song called ‘A Retraction’ toward the end of the record, and then ‘Fail,’ which is about my friend Marc Orleans who died. Those were both Boston stories, so sort of I knew it was going that way, and I knew those were Friendship Commanders songs because they were so noisy and loud-leaning.”
Audra’s gotten this personal with Friendship Commanders lyrics since at least the 2020 EP Hold on to Yourself, which she calls “a body of work about being an adult survivor of childhood abuse.” This time around, she tells a warts-and-all story about a turbulent season of her life she spent in Massachusetts.
“After the first few songs, I realized that I was writing about a time and place,” says Audra. “That was inspired by my friend Marc’s suicide. … He was an old Boston friend who had long since also left Boston and lived in New York. When he died, I was like, ‘There’s more to this experience that I need to talk about.’ But I never thought I would tell this story, because it’s not the most flattering story.”
“It wasn’t intended to be a conceptual work,” adds Roe. “It just ended up that way. We realized it was all connected eventually.”
With Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, The Gits, Black Sabbath and the entire pantheon of sludge and doom metal pioneers as their guides, Friendship Commanders tell the interconnected tales in “Move,” “High Sun,” “Distortion,” “Blue” and other songs with the ferocity and volume of Southern stoner-rock gods Jucifer and the attention to lyrical detail of an Americana wordsmith. Beyond having a compelling backstory for fans of Orleans, “Fail” serves as the ideal entry point to Mass — and the whole Friendship Commanders catalog, for that matter — due to the unholy marriage of its grimy instrumentation and its inviting vocal melodies.
“I think Marc would’ve liked it because it’s not a piano ballad that pretends life is perfect,” Audra says of “Fail.” It’s a noise-rock song for a noise-rock guitarist.”
The album concludes with “Dissonance,” a nearly five-minute recitation that sums up each overarching theme. In line with the nine songs that precede it, the poem’s words emote a swirl of emotional unease and hard-learned elation that’s unrelentingly dire yet far from defeatist. Audra wrote the verses in the van on the way to Nashville from Salem, Mass., where instrumental tracks for the rest of the album were co-produced by Converge’s Kurt Ballou. She recorded “Dissonance” back home in one take.
“Jerry had never read it or heard it before I recorded it, and then I said, ‘What do you think?’” explains Audra. “He was freaked out initially. He thought it was long. We both thought it was a big risk to end a metal record with a spoken-word piece, but it also seemed to fit and end the body of work, so it’s there.”
