Friendship Commanders’ songs are best experienced live. They deserve to be heard from the front row, where sludgy, chugging guitar that’s blasting through a Sunn amp can reverberate through your guts.
Alas, it is 2020, aka a perpetual Upside Down. So when singer/guitarist Buick Audra and drummer Jerry Roe took the stage at Exit/In on Thursday night, my front row was my bed and the Sunn amp was funneled through my Chromebook speakers. But enough about what was missing! I’m tired of thinking about what’s missing. (So much. All the time. Every day.) What Friendship Commanders did deliver last night was a marathon of a set — 50 almost non-stop minutes of doomy guitar and-drum-driven rock that hardly suffered from the less-than-ideal circumstances.
They opened with a personal favorite, “Anywhere (From the Nameless Bride),” a song from April’s Hold on to Yourself EP. I’m a sucker for the chorus, where Audra bellows out, “How’s your ego doin’,” to the abusive person who no longer has power over her. From there, the two rode the feedback into songs both old and new, including “In the Afterthoughts,” “Women to the Front” and “Charade,” all from 2018’s full-length Bill, and “The Enemy I Know,” another from Hold on to Yourself.
A highlight of the performance was when the band played, for the first time in a live setting, their two newest songs, “Stonechild” and “Your Time Has Come.” The two were released as a single earlier this year on Indigenous People’s Day.
"Stonechild" is in memory of Stonechild Chiefstick, a member of Washington’s Suquamish Tribal Community. He was shot and killed by Poulsbo police officer Craig Keller on July 3, 2019, in front of a large crowd gathered for a fireworks show. In April, Kitsap County prosecutor Chad Enright announced Keller would not be charged and that the shooting was justified.
“We wrote this song in protest of a life stolen and in solidarity with his family and the Suquamish Tribe,” Audra said. The song is as pissed as it is beautiful — a moment of both mourning and dissent.
“Your Reign Is Over,” is another frustrated rager, one that happily shows Trump and his cronies to the door. It was then, when Audra ended the song with an enthusiastic, “See ya, Donald Trump!” that I ached to be at the Exit/In and not my bedroom. I wanted to jump up and cheer. I wanted to echo Audra’s sentiments with hundreds of others and publicly revel in the election results.
Sadly, it’s 2020. Things are different. But even though I was on the other side of a computer screen, Friendship Commanders still helped me feel seen, heard and less alone.
“This wasn’t perfect, it will always be imperfect,” Audra said to the virtual crowd after a moving solo performance of “July’s Revelations” that ended the set. “But it was amazing to be here with you.”
I dunno, it felt pretty perfect to me.
