Description
Friendships Merge debut, Love the Stranger, moves like a country record skipping in just the right spot, leaving its fellow travelers longing for a place theyve only visited in their dreams. Guitarist Peter Gill, drummer Michael Cormier-OLeary, bassist Jon Samuels, and hawkeyed balladeer Dan Wriggins map out the groups particular, breathtaking landscape and invite the listener to share in its the Strangers invitation is all the more wondrous because its characters have clearly been hurt before. I need solitude and I also need you, Wriggins reckons in Ugly Little awake, vulnerable, and gimmickless, Friendship wont hesitate to confide in us, or even ask for help when the moment calls, like on the lyrical centerpiece of Alive Twice: Under your eyeball spell, I was losing myself/ Not in the good way you used to talk about / I remember a day, Cedar Park Cafe/ I was in a bad place and you set me straight/ With your on-the-nose instrumental pit stops at Kum and Go and Quickchek, local references in Love the Stranger create a catalog of human perception, presented as roadside attractions. From grape jelly residue (Ramekin) to the site of a demolished cathedral (St. Bonaventure) to King of the Hill quotations (Smooth Pursuit), the records images craft a symbolic language of high and low Americana, both evocative and consistently accessible. Spending time with Love the Stranger creates a community one in which the window between the listener and the music[1]maker shatters in full, until all that remains are the fragments you decide to pick up its sprawling lyrical references, Love the Strangers production is both familiar and capacious enough for pedal steel, synth strings, airy folk guitar field recordings, and MIDI pad exploration to work in vital harmony. Influenced by Friendships punk and indie peers as much as road-star forebears like Lucinda Williams and Lambchop, Wriggins says of the recording sessions: We all got to stretch out, chase our personal musical fixations, and build on each others Krieger, our engineer at Big Nice Studio, has a mind-blowing creative energy and hundreds (thousands?) of instruments. He recalls further: I wanted the album to sound like Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band in the 70s. Pete wanted it to sound like a semi full of spent fuel rods, barreling towards a runaway truck ramp. Jon kept reminding us that the studio is an instrument, and Michael wanted it to sound like the breakdown two-and-a-half minutes into Shuggie Otis Strawberry Letter breakdowns, however, are irreparable. Wriggins, a manual laborer and poet, calls Hank a song about when you go to fix something thats broken and realize the tools youre supposed to fix it with are also broken. Form follows function on the mesmerizing outro of the single, which buzzes with the sound of a shoddy Craigslist guitar from Woonsocket, RI (incidentally, the home of the Museum of Work and Culture) getting chainsawed in two. Friendship is probably already your favorite bands favorite band, a long-revered IYKYK of DIY with a devoted cult following from Wawa to In-N-Out. With Love the Stranger, the Friendship universe only continues to expand and grow more open-hearted, more inviting, with every passing note. Its a record that locates the listener exactly where the listener is, and wherever that may be, makes a friend out of them, too. All said and done, the age-old maxim of Mr. Chill holds true: You be real with me and Ill be real with you
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