Friendship with 2nd Grade and The Wickies

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Born in Maine, bred in Philadelphia, Friendship make their long overdue SPACE debut celebrating  their 2nd album for Merge Records.

Friendship

2nd Grade

The Wickies

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 Friendship’s new album and second for Merge Records, the band’s 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 music’s 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 O’Leary 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 Gill’s band 2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar of Lenderman’s, and finished on a barely-tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurn’s 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 Lenderman’s and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s 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.Lyrically, Caveman Wakes Up covers familiar Friendship ground — the sacred is profaned and the profane sanctified. On “All Over the World,” a landscaper “[feels] the beating heart of God/ laying down a roll of sod.” Characters complain about work and marvel at love. Here, however, we get Wriggins’ first real confrontation with depression, in “Hollow Skulls,” “All Over the World,” and “Resident Evil,” where the soul wages its perpetual war against darkness and stagnation. It often loses. The verses of Hollow Skulls are punctuated by passages of musical emptiness, a single suspended chord and brushes on a snare drum. When Wriggins complains about a roommate, shouting “who’s that shithead in my living room/ playing Resident Evil,” it’s abundantly clear there is no roommate, that the evil resides within.Caveman Wakes Up showcases Friendship’s particular genius for visionary arrangement, indebted equally across generations to to the folk-rock canon of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Emmylou Harris, to Indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo and Merge labelmates Lambchop, to contemporaries like Lomelda and ML Buch. Several of the songs employ fade-outs, jokingly referred to in the lyrics of “Love Vape,” and there are other elements lifted from Motown and 70s ballads: locked-in drum patterns, bass intervals, sentimental string arrangements. Each reference is pushed past genre, swirling and repeating, into something new and squarely belonging to the Friendship sound. On “Free Association,” “Artex,” and “Wildwood in January,” the groove is established so that other sounds can come and go seamlessly; mellotron patches, piano flurries and stabs, and clean guitar melodies, teeming textures disguised in unity. As a work of music production, Caveman Wakes Up is Friendship’s most advanced work yet, another testament to the band’s devotion and care.A droning chord calms nerves. A surreal poem moves us not because it’s familiar, but because it grows, stirs up the stagnant waters. A sizzle in the brain stem. Negative capability. Caveman Wakes Up is dreamy, luscious new growth for a band that has become an increasingly verdant oasis in the crescent of indie country civilization. Sure to excite and mystify, to continue growing, to cause new life.

Get off work. Get on the subway, maybe your bicycle. Put your earbuds in. A pop song only lasts a couple minutes, but can create a universe. 2nd Grade’s new 23-track album, Scheduled Explosions, is another entry in Philadelphia songwriter Peter Gill’s rapidly expanding catalog, and simultaneously his most focused and expansive work yet.Scheduled Explosions was home-recorded with friend and engineer Lucas Knapp (who recorded 2nd Grade’s breakthrough album <a href="https://dbldblwhmmy.com/product/hit_to_hit" title="https://dbldblwhmmy.com/product/hit_to_hit" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Hit to Hit</a>); it’s an odyssey of 60s-inspired dream logic driven by melody, charted through an environment of ambient violence and existential dread, and touching down in a pantheon of prolific pop weirdos like Robert Pollard, Alex Chilton, Lily Konigsberg, Chris Weisman, and Nate Amos. The work of a visionary at the height of his worldbuilding powers, Scheduled Explosions is a heat-seeking missive addressed to the past, present, and future of rock &amp; roll.

Quinnisa Kinsella-Mulkerin recorded her first song at five years old with her parents, who comprise the adventurous Maine band, Big Blood. Ever since the age of five, she was writing songs, banging on chimes, strumming guitars, and clanging together whatever else she could find. Improvisation was natural, and she stuck to the approach. Quinn brings this innate sense of songwriting to The Wickies, a duo she formed with Aiden Arel a year ago at age 16, whose chill approach and fluid delivery belie true inventiveness in the underneath mechanics. Now a four-piece with friends Josie on bass and Noah on drums, the expanded band makes their live debut at SPACE.Inspired by seventies folk icons like Stevie Nicks, Krautrock bands like Can, and modern indie-rockers like Alex G, The Wickies feel like an amalgamation of these decade-spanning sounds, but uniquely their own. Quinn’s voice croons like a seventies folk star, but it possesses a great and controlled tone. Her vocals feel like another instrument within the mix, building and growing each song to its fullest sound, leaving no detail within the mix unheard. Their use of echoing guitar lines recalls sixties psych, a springboard for their unique take.Quinn’s lush, free-flowing lyrics, created on the spot, complement Aiden’s fleshed out backing instrumentation and over-dubbing. Quickly, the pair created more material than they ever needed, allowing them to mold their recordings into a self-titled debut album. Like a painter crafting the perfect exhibition of their finest work, Aiden and Quinn condensed their improvisations to all the best parts. Tracks like “Campfire Song” and “Skipping Pond,” exemplify the ethereal and lackadaisical atmosphere of their sound. “I keep finding these weird, obscure bands from the seventies that have one album and nothing else, which is awesome,” Quinn said, “I want my music to sound like somebody found it in a record store that no one has ever heard of and uploaded it to YouTube. I want it to sound a little strange.”

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Friendship with 2nd Grade and The Wickies

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