Friendship: 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.

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 Hit to Hit); 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 & roll.

“Idle Ray is Thomas’ conscious return, after more than 20 years in the game, to how he started: recording guitar-based pop songs on his 4-track. And he’s taking the opportunity while traveling through the past to explore it from new angles. On “Polaroid,” Thomas looks through the viewfinder and sees an old way of living in sharp, self-aware focus, his voice bouncing atop a handclap-enhanced beat that recalls his old band, Saturday Looks Good To Me. He emerges alone with his guitar from behind the bristly cloud of fuzz that’s been building to let a little light in with the refrain, cleanly capping the song at both ends. “I used to have a Polaroid camera/I took it with me everywhere/I used to take pictures of people/so they’d remember I was there.” The narrator is a foil to the one in “House Show, Late December,” Aftering’s muted centerpiece, who carried a disposable for a different reason: searching for meaning in everything — “a vacant storefront, telephone wires, a cloud” — everything, that is, except people.” –dustedmagazine