Friendship, 'Caveman Wakes Up' Album Review

Friendship Find a Middle Ground on Caveman Wakes Up

The band Friendship is a vanguard, finding initial roots in North Carolina—with peers the likes of Wednesday, Sluice, and Fust, to name a few—and a connective tissue of fans stretching a greater distance. The Philadelphia quartet’s full-length introduction was Shock Out of Season in 2017, but they didn’t start making true waves until their Merge Records debut, Love the Stranger, five years later. Their latest effort, Caveman Wakes Up, is a record trending away from the clear-cut Americana elements of their previous work, sitting between that and their sparser, more electronically-based Dreamin’. With a brief listen, one can hear that Friendship frontman and songwriter Dan Wriggins is a modern-day successor to the late David Berman: his low timbre ranges from growling to purring, treading the line between singing and speaking no-frills; his anecdotal lyrics are set to a backdrop of twangy rock.

Berman once sang, “Songs build little rooms in time.” That seems to be the modus operandi of Wriggins’ songwriting style up to this point, too. He couches extracted conclusions and memories with particular physical perceptions and observations that provide a contextual (and textural) background (“Reconnected trailer hitch / Rerouted drainage ditch, tree of heaven in the concrete”). And if Friendship’s songs are rooms, then they have assembled and arranged the furniture in a way that immerses the listener with distinctive intimacy. Wriggins’ lyrics are succinct, gathering most of their flavor from how he enunciates, stressing a syllable over multiple measures (“Salvage Title,” “Artex”), or descending from “Elaborate dreams unremembered / Hollow skulls” to wordless, breathy notes at the end of “Hollow Skulls.” The vocals aren’t melodically dynamic, but they play well to Wriggins’ conversational posture.

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Wriggins is most effective in conjuring familiar images to many of us; his lyrics give off a “subterranean everyman Jonas Mekas” feeling, where they drift between candid and personally significant observations to be later bookended by general insight. The specificity of place that holds these insights reveals the profundity of everyday living for him, finding the answer to the question of “What’s loving you going to entail?” amidst consistently seeing patterns in an Artex ceiling, or asking “Who’s that monster I’ve been living with playing Resident Evil?” while contemplating the recent state of one’s dream life and the world around them.

Caveman Wakes Up is certainly literary in this sense, and some of the album’s instrumentation shines in response to the line breaks. Where Wriggins’ voice leaves off, various shades of concept leap into the mixture: Peter Gill’s guitar, for instance, appears as another decisive voice in the mix, creating a pleasant call and response between Wriggins and himself in “Betty Ford” and “Free Association,” both of which have the light and dense drums of Michael Cormier-O’Leary as a setting. Clouds of dissonance hang over certain songs; anxious strings lurk in the shadows of “Tree of Heaven” and “Artex,” sometimes to part and clear the way for Wriggins to return after catching his breath or observing his surroundings. Intersecting with these diaristic entries are delicate trellises arranged by Cormier-O’Leary, the band’s Swiss army knife, who extends these structures of woodwinds and strings and entrancing drum work.

Cormier-O’Leary’s string arrangements and Adelyn Strei’s clarinet undulate a time by the ocean on “Wildwood in January.” These foundations set up more delicate moments, such as Jon Samuels’ bass solo on “All Over the World” or Strei’s introductory fluttering flute in “Love Vape” leading into a surprisingly upbeat bass and rhythmically driven song. Parts of Caveman Wakes Up show the band putting forward different kinds of moods from their past work, such as the grungier “Resident Evil” and “Artex,” or the charged “Tree of Heaven,” while songs like “All Over the World” feel like they could’ve been a part of Dreamin’.

Abrupt beginnings and endings glare (“Resident Evil,” “Fantasia”); an unkemptness badgers the record—a lack of cohesiveness, as opposed to previous releases. The band has clearly attempted to expand their sound: dipping into more diverse musical terrains and trying to leap beyond them into a class of their own. As a result, each song feels like an encapsulation and works because of its distinctiveness. But it is that distinctiveness that also prevents the record from melding and setting as a whole. Vocally, Wriggins is at his strongest when the mix places him more prominently in the ear. But lyrically, it takes a step back from Love the Stranger, with some of its imagery not quite as compelling and, at points, poetically stagnating. Caveman Wakes Up is a record on the precipice of a breakthrough, but the inconsistent, patchworked tone and thematic material show the band still has some refining to do.

Andrew Ha is a freelance art writer. He hails from Nashville and is currently based in Southern Germany. Find more of his essay and memoir work here.

Friendship Find a Middle Ground on Caveman Wakes Up

The Philadelphia band’s new LP trends away from the clear-cut Americana elements of their previous efforts, sitting between that and their sparser, more electronically-based work.