Back in July we introduced full-length Make Strange Friends by Caged Animals, the recording project of songwriter Vin Cacchione and visual artist Magali Charron, with the single ‘Alligator‘. “There’s a strong Canadian influence to the release—recorded with Jon Mckiel in the Canadian Maritimes with Steven Lambke as a guest and released with You’ve Changed Records—but the song’s Southern Gothic vibe is decidedly American in flavour,” we wrote of the track. “A surreal tale of an encounter between two, contrasting Americas that only reinforces disconnection between them, delivered with Cacchione’s playful tones.”
If ‘Alligator’ seemed to embrace certain dualities and contradiction, then the full album takes things to a whole new level. The themes and narratives often explore binaries, the characters surrounded or alone, looking for home or running away from one, and the sound itself is happy to pair haunting atmosphere and cutting emotion with s sense of humour most zany and wry. Magali’s background as a visual artist has long pushed the project towards multimedia innovation, and Cacchione has also worked beyond the ordinary confines of music, collaborating with those behind fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and The Space Within. So it’s perhaps no surprise Make Strange Friends has loftier ambitions than most folk records. “On Make Strange Friends, Caged Animals have crafted a multifaceted album that is both a time capsule from a weird era and a tender love letter to the next chapter,” the label describe:
The album harks to lo-fi treasures like The Basement Tapes and Mellow Gold, marrying rough-hewn, folky impressionism with a lush, post-modern palette, including guest appearances from Jeff Tobias, Frankie Sunswept, and Steven Lambke. The result flickers with the blacklight anxiety of Nebraska, the sepia color of Deserter’s Songs, and the comic surrealism of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.
The resulting album is every bit as varied as that sounds. The protagonist (or more specifically, antihero) of opener ‘Rattle the Quiet’ is suitably stupefied, dropped into a too-bright morning tender and unprepared to face the consequences of the previous nights. But then ‘Radio Down’ soon follows with a satisfying sense of salvation, moving from the throes of addiction to a new life on the other side. The songs are changeable even within the own runtime, and often embrace what might seem competing moods simultaneously. Take ‘Balloon Heaven’ as a case in point, a single of taut bass and ambiguous imagery which conveys its moody atmosphere without sacrificing colour and groove. At once searching, almost desperate, yet still buoyed by its own momentum to have fun along the way.
Make Strange Friends is out now via You’ve Changed Records and available from the Caged Animal Bandcamp page.
