Billy Allen + The Pollies w/ Turn Turn Turn and The Dead Century at Turf Club

There is a ferocious Southern engine inside of Billy Allen + The Pollies’ debut album, Black Noise. It thrums to life atop a classic rock chassis and expertly weaves in and out of gospel, grunge, funk and soul along its eleven-song journey. From the explosive top of the album (a liberating anthem of self-worth called “All of Me”) to the spiritually haunting final track (the wurlitzer fueled “Go on Without Them”), Black Noise is a genre-defiant haymaker that lands.

Jay Burgess was raised in, on, and by the music of Muscle Shoals - He’s been a “young pup” to many of the Shoals music scene stalwarts for practically his entire adult life, going back to his days as a young guitar slinger and his early songwriting efforts (encouraged by Jason Isbell), all the way through to his creation of the Pollies, the band he’s used as a prism to reflect some of the weirder, prettier strains of Southern rock music. Many peg their music to decidedly non-Southern influences like Wilco or Neil Young, but the true spirit of the Pollies’ music is reflective of a long tradition that bears no resemblance to Molly Hatchett or the like. The sounds of Southern bands who don’t fit within the genre “Southern rock,” foremost among them the legendary Big Star from up the highway in Memphis, echo throughout the Pollies slightly weird, sometimes noisy, always pretty rock songs.

Turn Turn Turn is a trio who bonded over their mutual love of close harmony '60s and '70s country, folk, and pop music and formed an original Americana band. To create their distinctive sound, the band “turns” to the distant past of early American recorded music, “turns” again to that renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, and finally “turns” again to the present looking forward. Members Adam Levy (guitar, vocals), Savannah Smith (guitar, vocals), and Barb Brynstad (bass, vocals) are all mainstays of the Minnesota music scene and together craft an infectious, pop-infused Americana.

The Dead Century works in the deeply personal, loose-cannon narratives of The Hold Steady and Bruce Springsteen expressed through the expansive and emotionally engaging soundscapes of The War On Drugs. Their somewhat mercurial 2017 debut effort, the Nevada Sun EP, showcased the band's penchant for character and narrative-driven music. The band released the One More Year / Molly single in early 2018; Ten Ton Summer was released in August 2019. Two more singles came near the beginning of 2020, Bombay Beach and Realign. A longer recording effort followed, the result of which is The Well, their first studio album, which arrived in October of 2022.