After writing and recording their fourth album and
Merge Records debut,
Love the Stranger, together as a band,
Caveman Wakes Up finds the reflective, ambling Philadelphia outfit
Friendship back under the sway of singer/songwriter
Dan Wriggins, who wrote the album in the wake of a breakup. Begun on a down-tuned classical guitar belonging to
MJ Lenderman while crashing at the guitarist's home, and completed on an out-of-tune piano while rooming with
Sadurn's
G. DeGroot, it's a highly personal set of songs that was even recorded separately from his band:
Wriggins tracked vocals with
Love the Stranger producer
Bradford Krieger (
Horse Jumper of Love,
Nova One), while the rest of the group recorded with engineer
Jeff Ziegler (
the War on Drugs,
Torres), and additional instruments such as organ, flute, and violin were contributed by guests with engineer
Lucas Knapp (
2nd Grade,
Lightheaded). The results are perhaps surprisingly expressive and impulsive sounding, right in line with
Wriggins' particularly disgruntled prose and wearily anxious mood here as he tries to navigate the everyday. The deceptively relaxed "Salvage Title" starts things off with a meandering guitar line, light drums, and a bittersweet harmonic quality even before the singer's brittle, cracking voice enters a minute into the song with an elongated "Oh-whoa-ode" in a lament to car ownership. The more amped-up and angsty "Tree of Heaven," with its dissonant drone, sets a backdrop of concrete, waiting, and yelling for a chorus that repeats a distressed "You know you changed me," and he continues to struggle on "Betty Ford," a reference to being moved by a documentary ("I have been everyone/I've been so alone"). Elsewhere, the livelier "Love Vape" opens with flute and a playful bassline before lyrics begin with the cautionary phrase "Little flaw in the safety glass," and "Resident Evil" inhabits a more determined, midtempo jam-rock while ranting about the guy in his living room playing video games.
Caveman Wakes Up is populated with gas stations, cigarettes, trailer hitches, and nearly persistent feedback on songs where environments are inhospitable, but where he himself is the titular caveman -- and, it turns out, the "monster" playing video games ("The world's a scary place to be/But whose fault is that?"). The phrase "caveman wakes up" is taken from "Hollow Skulls," a simile for what he sees as "boring" stars.
Wriggins doesn't show signs of snapping out of his self-loathing until penultimate track and melodic album highlight "All Over the World," whose sparse rustic rock arrangement sounds sober compared to most of the rest. A deceptively artful examination of, and expression of, depression, the album ends with the relatively orchestral "Fantasia," which closes with the words "Imagine loving me like you love everything" before fading out. It may be worth noting that
Wriggins started on the album shortly after attending the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. ~ Marcy Donelson
