An album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving,
hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the
haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On
Caveman Wakes Up, Friendship’s new album and second for
Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of
country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset
by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm
section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford
fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a
dingy Philadelphia basement and was fronted by James Tate.
Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through eleven
murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical
substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into
the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to the
conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background,
steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually
and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative
soul.
Over the years, dedication has paid off. Friendship has become
a kind of reverse supergroup, wherein the band itself and each
individual member are located centrally in an increasingly
prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and
songwriters. Drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary leads the
instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon
Samuels, runs Dear Life Records, home to friends and peers
who count Friendship as a major influence including MJ
Lenderman, Florry, and Fust. (Samuels also plays lead guitar
in MJ Lenderman and the Wind). Guitarist Peter Gill’s band
2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the
songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar
of Lenderman’s and finished on a barely tuned piano in an
apartment he shared with Sadurn’s G DeGroot.
In the summer of 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust for
the academic poetry world grew in tandem. A relationship fell
apart, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lenderman
and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s home in North Carolina,
where he recorded the first demos of “Resident Evil,” “All
Over the World,” and “Love Vape.” Wriggins returned to
Philadelphia, and the band got to work on new ideas, finally
tracking the album in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler
(Mary Lattimore, War on Drugs). Wriggins recorded vocals
with Love the Stranger engineer Bradford Kreiger, and organ,
violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded
by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church.
Lyrically, Caveman Wakes Up covers familiar Friendship
ground—the sacred is profaned and the profane sanctified. On
“All Over the World,” a landscaper “[feels] the beating heart of
God/ laying down a roll of sod.” Characters complain about
work and marvel at love. Here, however, we get Wriggins’ first
real confrontation with depression, in “Hollow Skulls,” “All
Over the World,” and “Resident Evil,” where the soul wages its
perpetual war against darkness and stagnation. It often loses.
The verses of “Hollow Skulls” are punctuated by passages of
musical emptiness, a single suspended chord, and brushes on
a snare drum. When Wriggins complains about a roommate,
shouting, “Who’s that shithead in my living room/ playing
Resident Evil,” it’s abundantly clear there is no roommate, that
the evil resides within.
Caveman Wakes Up showcases Friendship’s particular genius
for visionary arrangement, indebted equally across generations
to the folk-rock canon of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and
Emmylou Harris, to indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo and
Merge labelmates Lambchop, to contemporaries like Lomelda
and ML Buch. Several of the songs employ fade-outs, jokingly
referred to in the lyrics of “Love Vape,” and there are other
elements lifted from Motown and ’70s ballads: locked-in drum
patterns, bass intervals, sentimental string arrangements.
Each reference is pushed past genre, swirling and repeating,
into something new and squarely belonging to the Friendship
sound. On “Free Association,” “Artex,” and “Wildwood in
January,” the groove is established so that other sounds can
come and go seamlessly; Mellotron patches, piano flurries and
stabs, and clean guitar melodies, teeming textures disguised
in unity. As a work of music production, Caveman Wakes Up
is Friendship’s most advanced yet, another testament to the
band’s devotion and care.
A droning chord calms nerves. A surreal poem moves us not
because it’s familiar but because it grows, stirs up the stagnant
waters. A sizzle in the brain stem. Negative capability. Caveman
Wakes Up is dreamy, luscious new growth for a band that has
become an increasingly verdant oasis in the crescent of indie
country civilization. Sure to excite and mystify, to continue
growing, to cause new life.
An album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving,
hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the
haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On
Caveman Wakes Up, Friendship’s new album and second for
Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of
country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset
by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm
section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford
fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a
dingy Philadelphia basement and was fronted by James Tate.
Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through eleven
murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical
substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into
the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to the
conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background,
steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually
and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative
soul.
Over the years, dedication has paid off. Friendship has become
a kind of reverse supergroup, wherein the band itself and each
individual member are located centrally in an increasingly
prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and
songwriters. Drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary leads the
instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon
Samuels, runs Dear Life Records, home to friends and peers
who count Friendship as a major influence including MJ
Lenderman, Florry, and Fust. (Samuels also plays lead guitar
in MJ Lenderman and the Wind). Guitarist Peter Gill’s band
2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the
songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar
of Lenderman’s and finished on a barely tuned piano in an
apartment he shared with Sadurn’s G DeGroot.
In the summer of 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust for
the academic poetry world grew in tandem. A relationship fell
apart, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lenderman
and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s home in North Carolina,
where he recorded the first demos of “Resident Evil,” “All
Over the World,” and “Love Vape.” Wriggins returned to
Philadelphia, and the band got to work on new ideas, finally
tracking the album in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler
(Mary Lattimore, War on Drugs). Wriggins recorded vocals
with Love the Stranger engineer Bradford Kreiger, and organ,
violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded
by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church.
Lyrically, Caveman Wakes Up covers familiar Friendship
ground—the sacred is profaned and the profane sanctified. On
“All Over the World,” a landscaper “[feels] the beating heart of
God/ laying down a roll of sod.” Characters complain about
work and marvel at love. Here, however, we get Wriggins’ first
real confrontation with depression, in “Hollow Skulls,” “All
Over the World,” and “Resident Evil,” where the soul wages its
perpetual war against darkness and stagnation. It often loses.
The verses of “Hollow Skulls” are punctuated by passages of
musical emptiness, a single suspended chord, and brushes on
a snare drum. When Wriggins complains about a roommate,
shouting, “Who’s that shithead in my living room/ playing
Resident Evil,” it’s abundantly clear there is no roommate, that
the evil resides within.
Caveman Wakes Up showcases Friendship’s particular genius
for visionary arrangement, indebted equally across generations
to the folk-rock canon of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and
Emmylou Harris, to indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo and
Merge labelmates Lambchop, to contemporaries like Lomelda
and ML Buch. Several of the songs employ fade-outs, jokingly
referred to in the lyrics of “Love Vape,” and there are other
elements lifted from Motown and ’70s ballads: locked-in drum
patterns, bass intervals, sentimental string arrangements.
Each reference is pushed past genre, swirling and repeating,
into something new and squarely belonging to the Friendship
sound. On “Free Association,” “Artex,” and “Wildwood in
January,” the groove is established so that other sounds can
come and go seamlessly; Mellotron patches, piano flurries and
stabs, and clean guitar melodies, teeming textures disguised
in unity. As a work of music production, Caveman Wakes Up
is Friendship’s most advanced yet, another testament to the
band’s devotion and care.
A droning chord calms nerves. A surreal poem moves us not
because it’s familiar but because it grows, stirs up the stagnant
waters. A sizzle in the brain stem. Negative capability. Caveman
Wakes Up is dreamy, luscious new growth for a band that has
become an increasingly verdant oasis in the crescent of indie
country civilization. Sure to excite and mystify, to continue
growing, to cause new life.
