{"id":140913,"date":"2025-05-29T08:17:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T08:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/140913\/"},"modified":"2025-05-29T08:17:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T08:17:08","slug":"friendship-caveman-wakes-up-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/140913\/","title":{"rendered":"Friendship: Caveman Wakes Up Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2017, road crews working to remove a road sign in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, toppled the sign into traffic, causing lengthy backups\u2014and inspiring an eyewitness report that has become a minor viral sensation<\/a> over the years. One Philadelphia man, interviewed by a local CBS affiliate<\/a>, looked up at the construction team\u2019s flashes of light in the sky that night and, for a brief moment, saw the cosmos: \u201cI thought it was a bunch of shooting stars,\u201d he recalled, eyes wide. \u201cI was making a bunch of wishes.\u201d<\/p>\n

That moment could be a lyric from Caveman Wakes Up, the humbly exceptional fifth album from Philadelphia\u2019s very own Friendship<\/a>. Across the record, the four members of the group sketch a starry-eyed map of the city: \u201cI have chilled on that stoop before,\u201d frontman Dan Wriggins sings on \u201cTree of Heaven,\u201d as if memorializing a former battleground: \u201cNothing is forgotten.\u201d On a song called \u201cLove Vape,\u201d he spends half a verse romanticizing a gas station off Locust Street that has the \u201ccheapest cigarettes on Earth.\u201d On \u201cAll Over the World,\u201d he looks up at the sun while stoned at his landscaping job and feels \u201cthe beating heart of God.\u201d If you stay long enough in one place, Caveman Wakes Up suggests, you start to find warped profundity in the everyday.<\/p>\n

Friendship have spent the past decade finding cosmic meaning in the tangled metaphors of contemporary life. Over the course of the band\u2019s discography, Wriggins has painstakingly examined aleatory minutiae, seeing the poetry in a ramekin of leftover jelly<\/a>, a six-pack of beer on the porch<\/a>, the resilience of a pestering housefly<\/a>. Fleeting emotional truths erupt from his baritone delivery like ants scattering from an overturned rock. With each album, the band\u2019s tweaks to the indie-folk canon have steadily grown more complex and self-assured, from the lonely thud of a drum machine on 2017\u2019s Shock Out of Season<\/a> to the stomp-clap rhythms and slow-burning melodies of their 2022 Merge debut Love the Stranger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All the while, the band members\u2019 individual pursuits have somewhat retroactively rendered Friendship a dirtbag Americana supergroup. Guitarist Peter Gill fronts the prolific power-pop revival act 2nd Grade<\/a>; percussionist Michael Cormier-O\u2019Leary co-runs the Philadelphia label Dear Life<\/a> and composes for the instrumental chamber-folk ensemble Hour<\/a>; bassist Jon Samuels plays in 2nd Grade, co-runs Dear Life with Cormier-O\u2019Leary, and is the touring guitarist for MJ Lenderman<\/a>. Wriggins, meanwhile, spent the past few years splitting his time between odd jobs and writing his first book of poetry<\/a> while pursuing an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop (\u201cI woke up loving the sea. Enormous and full of garbage,\u201d begins one typical entry). Caveman Wakes Up is a spit-shined culmination of the band\u2019s collective powers, a ramshackle triumph that transforms gritted-teeth non sequiturs into unlikely anthems for the downwardly mobile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2017, road crews working to remove a road sign in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, toppled the sign into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-140913","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114590137886336673","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}