LOVE THE STRANGER FRIENDSHIP
Pickup available at Poole
Usually ready in 24 hours
Friendship's Merge debut, Love the Stranger, moves like a country record skipping in just the right spot, leaving its fellow travelers longing for a place they've only visited in their dreams. Guitarist Peter Gill, drummer Michael Cormier-O'Leary, bassist Jon Samuels, and hawkeyed balladeer Dan Wriggins map out the group's particular, breathtaking landscape and invite the listener to share in its glory.
Love the Stranger's 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 Victory."
Wide awake, vulnerable, and gimmickless, Friendship won't 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 advice.
Between 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 record's 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 together.
Like its sprawling lyrical references, Love the Stranger's 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 Friendship's 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' work.
Bradford 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 23.'"
Some breakdowns, however, are irreparable. Wriggins, a manual laborer and poet, calls "Hank" "a song about when you go to fix something that's broken and realize the tools you're 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 band's 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. It's 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 I'll be real with you"
Product information
Shipping
Boiler Room use Royal Mail to send all deliveries. All prices are per Royal Mail set pricing structure.
NOTE: 1 LP weighs approx. 0.23 Kg and 1 Single weighs approx. 0.60kg. 5 LPs therefore, can be sent for under 2KG.
United Kingdom
- Singles/7”: £2.52, Signed 2nd Class Royal Mail
- LPs and 10”: £4 for up to 2kg and less than £50 – Signed 2nd Class Royal Mail
- LPs and 10”: £5.10 for up to 2kg and between £51 and £150 – Tracked 48 Signed
- LPS and 10”: £12.00 for up to 2kg and over £150 – Royal Mail Special Delivery
- For Packages above 2kg (6 plus records) – £10.95 up to 5kg and 15.95 from 5k to 10k
Delivery is by Parcel Force
Europe
- Singles/7” : £8.45, Royal Mail Signed and Tracked
- LPs and 10”: £11.50 for up to 2kg and less than £500 – Royal Mail Signed and Tracked
- For Packages above 2kg (6 plus records) – £18.75 up to 10kg.
Delivery is by Parcel Force
World Zone 1
United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, India, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Vietnam.
- Singles/LPs/10”: £14.00 up to 1.5kg and less than £500 – Royal Mail Signed and Tracked
- Singles/LPs/10”: £18.00 over 1.5kg and less than 2kg and less than £500 – Royal Mail Signed and Tracked
- For Packages above 2kg (6 plus records) – £35 up to 10kg.
Delivery is by Parcel Force
World Zone 2
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Fiji.
- Singles/LPs/10”: £15.00 up to 1.5kg and less than £500 – Royal Mail Signed and Tracked
- Singles/LPs/10”: £21.50 over 1.5kg and less than 2kg and less than £500 – Royal Mail Signed and Tracked
- For Packages above 2kg (6 plus records) – £43 up to 10kg.
Delivery is by Parcel Force
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Forfeiture of Cancellation Right
Your right to cancel may be forfeited if you unseal goods that are not suitable for return due to hygiene or health reasons, unseal sealed audio/video recordings or software, or combine goods with other items to make them inseparable.
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