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In 2017, road crews in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, inadvertently sent a road sign into traffic while attempting to remove it, resulting in extensive delays. This incident inspired an eyewitness account that has gained a viral following. One Philadelphia man, interviewed by a local CBS affiliate, gazed up at the construction team’s lights flickering in the night sky and, if only for a fleeting moment, glimpsed the universe: “I thought it was a bunch of shooting stars,” he reminisced, eyes sparkling. “I was making a bunch of wishes.”
This moment might as well be a lyric from Caveman Wakes Up, the beautifully understated fifth album by Philadelphia’s own Friendship. Throughout the album, the four members weave a whimsical tapestry of the city: “I have chilled on that stoop before,” frontman Dan Wriggins muses in “Tree of Heaven,” as if paying tribute to a once-familiar site: “Nothing is forgotten.” In the track “Love Vape,” he romantically depicts a gas station on Locust Street with the “cheapest cigarettes on Earth.” On “All Over the World,” he gazes at the sun while stoned at his landscaping job, feeling “the beating heart of God.” The message of Caveman Wakes Up seems to suggest that if you linger long enough in one spot, you can discover warped profundity in the mundane.
Over the past decade, Friendship has searched for cosmic significance amid the tangled metaphors of modern life. Through their discography, Wriggins meticulously dissects random details, uncovering the poetry in a ramekin of leftover jelly, a six-pack of beer on the porch, and the persistence of a bothersome housefly. Evocative emotional truths spring forth from his baritone like ants scattering from a flipped rock. Each album sees the band refining their approach to indie-folk, growing increasingly intricate and self-assured, from the solitary pulse of a drum machine on 2017’s Shock Out of Season to the stomp-clap rhythms and slow-burn melodies of their 2022 Merge debut Love the Stranger.
Meanwhile, the individual pursuits of the band members have retroactively positioned Friendship as a dirtbag Americana supergroup. Guitarist Peter Gill leads the prolific power-pop revival band 2nd Grade; percussionist Michael Cormier-O’Leary co-manages the Philadelphia label Dear Life and composes for the instrumental chamber-folk group Hour; bassist Jon Samuels plays in 2nd Grade, co-manages Dear Life with Cormier-O’Leary, and serves as the touring guitarist for MJ Lenderman. Wriggins, in the meantime, has spent the last few years balancing odd jobs with writing his debut poetry collection while pursuing an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop (“I woke up loving the sea. Enormous and full of garbage,” begins one typical entry). Caveman Wakes Up is a polished culmination of the band’s combined strengths, a ramshackle victory that transforms gritted-teeth non sequiturs into unexpected anthems for the struggling.
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