Friendship / Natalie Jane Hill

Doors: 8PM / Show: 9PM / 21+Music 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 Friendships new album and second for Merge Records, the bands 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 musics 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 is located centrally in an increasingly prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and songwriters. Drummer Michael Cormier OLeary leads the instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon Samuels, run 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 Gills band 2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar of Lendermans, and finished on a barely-tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurns 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 Lendermans and Wednesdays Karly Hartzmans 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.

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