birnCORE Live featuring Weakened Friends, Lady Pills, and Mom Rock at Cafe 939

Tickets are now on sale for birnCORE Live featuring Weakened Friends, Lady Pills, and Mom Rock! birnCORE Live is the BIRN’s annual live music party hosted at the Red Room at Cafe 939. Past artists have included Kaki King, and Taylor McFerrin.

Coming from Portland, Maine, Weakened Friends is a rock band using music as a low pressure outlet for expressing volatile emotions. Their latest release and full-length debut Common Blah delves into the chaos and confusion that often comes with the arrival of adulthood. The band’s frontman Sonia Sturino says that the name “Common Blah” was inspired from compliments such as “You have a really cool job” or “Your band is cool”, when life wasn’t so bright on the other side. “It was ‘Common Blah’ though because I was miserable,” she says. “Now, I’m at the other end of the spectrum. In a lot of ways, this is the first time I’ve found happiness. I wrote the lyrics about the time before that happiness.”

Using both instrumental and emotional volume to bring truthful lyrics to life, the album unapologetically includes plenty of heavy shredding, scratchy vocal takes and screechy feedback. Sturino feels that writing for Weakened Friends is more of a physical process than a mental one–“I have to feel the vibration or sound coming out of my body. I need the physicality to do it, to enjoy singing it,” she says.

Lady Pills is a punk rock band originally formed at Berklee College of Music. With roots in the Boston DIY music community, the band expresses their unique take on this scene at their shows, as well as social responsibility and life in the 21st century. The dynamic three-piece band performs with interchanging vocal harmonies, and duet-like guitar and bass lines that make for a warm sound.

With a sound inspired by bands like Weezer, Talking Heads, and Catfish and the Bottlemen, Mom Rock is an energetic Boston-based rock group to keep an eye out for. Known for their exciting live performances with an eclectic set of songs, Mom Rock’s music is swiftly drawing a widespread audience, having hit over 333,000+ streams on Spotify and 70,000+ individual listeners within the last 9 months.

birnCORE Live takes place on Thursday, December 5 at 8:00 p.m. Admission is $10 in advance, with a student discount for $8, and can be purchased here.