Freidrich$ makes romantic failure feel cosmically absurd on new EP 'Doll, Here I Am'

On his new EP 'Doll, Here I Am', Freidrich$ somehow makes wanting somebody to text you back feel like a problem on the same scale as reincarnation, metaphysical imprisonment and the possible structure of the universe. That sounds ridiculous, but it's also precisely why the EP works.

Following the acoustic sparseness of 'I Came Across', Freidrich$ makes a different kind of reduction here. Much of the processing that previously distorted or concealed his voice disappears, leaving him unusually exposed. He talks, sings, cracks jokes, remembers old arguments and occasionally sounds as though the songs have caught him halfway through thinking aloud.

It's an excellent fit for material preoccupied with attention. Again and again, he wants to be noticed, loved or adored, yet seems mortified by the vulnerability required to admit it. Romantic longing is stripped of grandeur and allowed to become needy, funny, pathetic and genuinely affecting all at once.

Old relationships are revisited years later, while memories of listening to Bright Eyes become tangled with his own understanding of heartbreak itself. References arrive from everywhere and collide with deliberately mundane moments until high thought and low humour become impossible to separate.

Then the EP starts looking beyond romance altogether, as Gnostic ideas, reincarnation, the Bardo state and Gurdjieff’s stranger cosmological theories gradually creep into the same mental landscape. That jump from bedroom misery to cosmic imprisonment should be ludicrous. But in Freidrich$’s hands, it feels strangely logical.

Messy, funny and startlingly exposed, 'Doll, Here I Am' succeeds by refusing to separate profound questions from embarrassing ones. Freidrich$ seems to understand that sometimes the distance between “Why doesn’t she love me?” and “What is the nature of existence?” is considerably smaller than anyone would like to admit.