Caged Animals "Make Strange Friends"
Vin grew up in New Jersey, so it’s in his nature to try a little harder. The son of a NYC stand-up comic and a public school teacher, he gravitated to songwriting at a young age and became a student at anti-folk academy. At the East Village’s fabled Sidewalk Café, you lived or died by what you were able to say and Vin’s songs say a lot. From early solo performances to his work in the underrated noir-indie-rocker’s Soft Black (with DIIV’s Cole Smith), Vin’s songs have maintained a cutting sincerity.
Over the last decade, he has collaborated with pioneering figures in fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale, The Space Within, and Hedwig creator John Cameron Mitchell, honing his craft as a storyteller and songwriter along the way.
Make Strange Friends was conceived during a transitional moment in Vin and Magali’s lives, after relocating to Magali’s hometown in Sackville, New Brunswick. There they met indie songwriter Jon Mckiel, whose collaboration proved crucial.
With McKiel as co-producer, they embraced a raw, spontaneous recording approach on his Tascam 388 tape machine. 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.
Mckiel’s straight-to-tape warmth complemented Vin’s gritty songs, which weave stories of isolated characters reaching for connection. From the bleary-eyed antiheroes on “Rattle The Quiet,” “Crow,” and “Big Bad Wolf” to the redemptive story of overcoming addiction in “Radio Down,” the album is powered by people on the fringe, oscillating between moments of contemplative solitude and explosive emotion.
Make Strange Friends parses the world through its binaries: the characters are either running away or stuck forever, totally isolated or desperately connected, like the opiated lovers in “Blood Moon.” The music strikes haunted chords, but the characters say funny things.
On the MAGA-critical “Alligator,” its crimson-hatted antagonist pulls melody from a cock-eyed aphorism, “if you’re trying to lick an alligator you’ve gotta be in biting range.” From “Building A Monster’s”AI roast to the sarcastic takedown on the academic male-ego on “Inflated,” Make Strange Friends asks us to remember the old world and “huff and puff” until it’s blown away.
The album concludes with “Make Strange Friends,” a surreal two-man play written by Vin, produced as an old-school radio drama. "Make Strange Friends" explores cultural misunderstandings and human connection and stars the writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman and Magali’s 92-year-old grandfather, Bertholet Charron, striking a unique harmony with the album’s songs. In 2019 Vin produced Ratso's debut album Stubborn Heart which features contributions from Nick Cave, Yasmine Hamdan, John Cale, and Warren Ellis.
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.
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