Pressing Concerns: Biz Turkey, Friendship Commanders, TIFFY, Smokers

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Hey there, and welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! If you like the more “eclectic”/”grab bag” kinds of blog posts, this one’s for you: we’ve got new albums from Biz Turkey and Smokers, a new EP from TIFFY, and an alternate version of Friendship Commanders‘ sophomore album down below.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Biz Turkey – Biz Turkey

Release date: May 31st
Record label: Third Uncle
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Dylan Goes Electric

Here are a few names I didn’t know about until very recently: Biz Turkey, Graham Wood, Third Uncle Records. The latter two of those have a history together going back to the mid-2000s, when Wood was making music regularly as Gray Home Music, playing with a wide assortment of musicians including Ian Stynes, Matt Retzer, and Josh Hunter (various combinations of the four of them have also played in several other groups together; refer to this Instagram post for details). A few years after the last Gray Home Music album (which came out in 2014), Retzer and Wood both found themselves in Maine and begin making music together as Biz Turkey, although their long-in-the-making self-titled debut record is an amorphous thing–befitting of an album made by a tight-knit group of musicians, Biz Turkey features remote and/or in-person contributions from various sessions featuring Stynes, Hunter, and Retzer dating back to 2016 (the fifth member of Biz Turkey, the mysterious guitarist Conrad Carpenter, is of unknown origins and whereabouts to me). As piecemeal as its origins are, Biz Turkey sounds like the work of a real, coherent band of collaborators (which it is, new project or no), with a clear handle on their specific style of pessimistic-feeling, pop-friendly electric indie rock.

If you like the less jammy side of Built to Spill and the more guitar-based music of Grandaddy, I’ve got great news for you with regards to what Biz Turkey sounds like (the group also recently played a show with fellow Portland, Maine musician Brock Ginther, and the more melancholic moments of his bands Midwestern Medicine and Lemon Pitch are something else of which Biz Turkey remind me). Biz Turkey captures the moment where the basement indie rock of the 90s started transforming into something larger and more aware of the concept of “the outdoors”. As a vocalist, Wood sounds lost but still alert in the midst of these wandering instrumentals–every musician on any given track sounds like they’re following something different, but they’re all so in tune with each other that the puzzle pieces fit nonetheless. “Dylan Goes Electric” is a compelling first song–it gives the feeling that we’ve just stepped aboard a sinking ship. Biz Turkey filters themselves into something resembling power pop in “Loudest Voice in the Room”, an upbeat song that they match a few songs later in the Dough Martsch-ian swirling march of “Well Done” (and then zag in the form of the Jason Lytle-esque “I’m Not Here to Make Friends” right after). Biz Turkey almost gets more of a spine as it progresses, with the last few songs ringing the loudest and clearest. It’s great to hear the full might the band conjure up in “Step Aside” and “What a Disaster”, yes–but that doesn’t take away from the equally-intriguing sound of Biz Turkey groping about in the darkness. (Bandcamp link)

Friendship Commanders – BILL (The Steve Albini Mixes)

Release date: July 22nd
Record label: Trimming the Shield
Genre: Noise rock, punk rock, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Outlive You

In late 2017, Nashville duo Friendship Commanders traveled up to Chicago to record what would become their second album, 2018’s BILL, at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini. The band (singer/guitarist Buick Audra and bassist/drummer Jerry Roe) have always had an interesting sound–on their debut, 2016’s DAVE, they’re an energetic, heavy punk rock group, while they’d fully transformed into an even-heavier, sludgier stoner rock group by last year’s MASS. Charting their trajectory in hindsight, Albini is the perfect choice to aid in that transition, as he’d helped bands like Screaming Females and Cloud Nothings turn from punk-inspired indie rock groups into something more towering in landmark records. BILL was tracked live to tape by Albini and eventually mixed by Roe, but the band held onto Albini’s original mixes and planned to release them at some point–Albini’s sudden and unexpected death became the impetus for the mixes to finally see the light of day. Albini’s touch was already felt throughout BILL via his recording, of course–this new version of the album is less a spotlight on him as an engineer than as a welcome chance to revisit a record that still sounds powerful and tough over a half-decade later.

Plowing through thirteen songs in thirty-three minutes, BILL definitely feels like a punk album–at the very least, Friendship Commanders are making “heavy rock and roll” at this point in their music career. The songs rush by in a blur, whirlwinds of crushing rhythm sections, loud guitars, and Audra’s commanding, centered vocals. Fast punk-powered instrumentals like “Horrify”, “Saw and Heard”, and “Outlive You” stick around just long enough to sear an impression into one’s brain–there are pop sensibilities in their respective refrains, neither outshining nor being swallowed up by the instrumental might found elsewhere in the tracks. Signs of Friendship Commanders’ slower, heavier future are less frequent on BILL, but they’re there, and quite prominently so when they are. Opening track “Your Fear Is Showing”, closing number “Desperately Seeking”, and mid-record centerpiece “In the Afterthoughts” all qualify–one can tell by their positioning in the record and the weight Albini and the band give them that they were proud of being able to pull the likes of these songs off, and it’s not surprising they latched onto this side of their sound in the future. That being said, Friendship Commanders sound their best on BILL when they’re barreling through the last gasps of their punk rock past, which they continue to do as the record winds down in “The Choice”, “Resolution of the Wants”, and “Of the We”. Kind of remarkable how one engineer consistently found himself in the right place at the right time, no? (Bandcamp link)

TIFFY – 2

Release date: August 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dream pop, indie punk, 90s indie rock, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Surf Camp

After a couple of EPs, Somerville, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Tiffany Sammy made her full-length debut as TIFFY last year with So Serious. I referred to that album as an “inspired marriage of jagged alt-rock and more polished pop” at the time, and it felt like what her various smaller releases (also including a few singles and demos) had been leading up to for nearly a half-decade. I wasn’t expecting to hear another TIFFY record less than a year later, but she’s turned around and released a new EP called 2 (somewhat confusingly, her third EP and fourth record), containing three brand new songs and one reworking of a song from So Serious. Perhaps understandably, 2 feels looser and more “low-stakes” than the TIFFY LP–recorded by ringer Justin Pizzoferrato and featuring instrumental contributions from Tom Stevens and Ben “Cutty” Cuthbert, Sammy’s latest release is a pleasing coda to So Serious. While 2 doesn’t try to do everything that Sammy did on her last album, it offers up a bit of what worked on that LP and tries a couple of things beyond that “sound”, as well.

Sammy self-describes her music as “fuzz-tinged dream rock”, and nowhere is this more true than in 2’s opening track, “Mirror”. “Mirror” is also the song from the EP that sounds like it would’ve been the most at home on So Serious to my ears–Sammy and Stevens’ dual guitar attack is on point, offering up a buffet of memorable, catchy leads while Sammy slowly adds more and more drama to her performance as a vocalist as the song rolls forward. “Surf Camp” feels like the classic “B-side that’s secretly better than the A-side” to me–it’s a more laid-back version of TIFFY’s guitar pop, but it’s incredibly well-done, and it really does feel like it’s about to crash upon shore by the time it’s over. Redos of old songs are starting to become a TIFFY staple (both So Serious and the TIFFY EP had at least one)–this time around, she offers up a new version of “Lost in the Shuffle” from her last album. A minute longer than the 2023 recording, “Lost in the Shuffle (2024)” is an extended, more rock-based take on the original’s polished, danceable dream pop (it’s still danceable–I imagine that this louder version is closer to how it sounds in a live setting). “L.A. Fade” closes the record with a memorable, offbeat pop closer, going from bouncy, guitar-forward bummer pop to dreamy and floating and then back again. It’s a strong cap to a brief but welcome drop-in from TIFFY. (Bandcamp link)

Smokers – The Rat That Gnawed the Rope

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Mouth Magazine
Genre: Punk rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Irish Tenor

Oakland’s Smokers have been kicking around for about a decade at this point, and the band’s four members (vocalist/guitarist Andy Asp, bassist Cyrus Comiskey, guitarist Omen Starr, and drummer Jim Nastic) are all Bay Area punk veterans, but The Rat That Gnawed the Rope is the quartet’s first full-length as a group. Some of these tracks had previously shown up as singles and on demo tapes, but the band finally hammered out these fifteen tracks via sessions at San Francisco’s El Studio (with Phil Becker) and Oakland’s Tuff Bunker. The resultant LP is a compelling rock and roll record–calling themselves “pub punk”, Smokers have a somewhat seedy sound harkening back to the earliest days of punk rock. Blistering garage rock and pub rock certainly have footholds throughout The Rat That Gnawed the Rope, but this is straight-up “punk” if I’ve ever heard it, right out of the era before the darker and angrier edges of the genre had splintered into “post-punk” and “hardcore”–listening to The Rat That Gnawed the Rope is to take all of it in at once.

Roughly three decades removed from his work with Lookout! Records country-punk group Nuisance, Asp remains a sharp punk showman of a vocalist, a limited “technical” range supplemented with an impressive emotional one that can switch from conversational to smarmy to tortured easily. With fifteen songs to blast through, Smokers aren’t one to give into embellishments and overproduction on The Rat That Gnawed the Rope, but the occasional trick up their sleeve (like the Hammond organ found in the dark opening track “The Irish Tenor”, or the barroom piano and tambourine injecting just a bit of garage rock chaos into “Rum Ration”, or the acoustic guitar frantically trying to keep up with the rest of “The Strand”) hardly detracts from the band’s raw power. Smokers are certainly serious punk rockers–in some ways, this is a photo negative of the goofy West Coast pop punk that they’ll always be just a degree removed from–but the skill and energy of the group (who, again, have been playing with each other for a decade by now) ensure that stuff like “Cutting Class” and “East of Oakland” are anything but chores to listen to. One of the most spirited songs on the record is the penultimate track, “Deviant Career”–it’s got a spaghetti western outlaw bent to it, but one could apply it to the four-person gang playing these songs, as well. (Bandcamp link)

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