Caged Animals: Eat Their Own
“If Alan Vega was 40 years younger, he’d be doing this. Or if they remade Blue Velvet, this could work as the soundtrack” (The Guardian)
“…Sounds something like a hip-hop-influenced Velvet Underground.” (The New Yorker)
Names like Arthur Russell or Beck get cited often as influences, but it is rare that upon listening to a modern artist you feel the genre-fusing depth of either of these legends. In New Jersey’s Caged Animals we bring you the exception to the rule.
Smudged round the edges, shrouded in shadows and fog, but full to bursting with heart and soul, Vincent Cacchione offers swoon-some pop, unafraid to deal with the depths of emotion, or to put the song at the forefront of his pursuit for the ultimate organic-electronic hybrid, even more so than current innovators Atlas Sound, or Animal Collective.
Known also for his work with Soft Black, the now-Bushwick resident, Cacchione, brings poetry and melody in equal proportion to his foremost musical project. With unflinching emotion, he traces the fissures of the human heart, reflecting the many guises and soundtracks of the man. He can be a perma-surfer teenager hanging with rebel “Hazy Girls” or a man yearning for romance, in “This Summer I’ll Make It Up To You”. He sweetly, but contemporarily, references doo-wop’s gorgeousness in “The NJ Turnpike”, akin to a missing Frankie Valli track produced by Air, and is still capable of writing pitch-shifted lighter anthems that come on like urban ballads with real insight, in “Piles Of $$$”, next to the sensitive anguish of “Instant <3 Breaker” and the irresistible ironic pop of “Teflon Heart” , where Cacchione creates the most unlikely, but hugely memorable, rhymes, “I know, you know I’m not bourgeois, but you act like I’m a replica. A ghost inside your retina that only you can see”.
Make sure to catch the band when they play live – it’s a family affair; the Caged collective bring a different life to the animal, with partner, Magali Charron, as chanteuse and ethereal orchestrator, sister Talya on bass, like a cocktail of Kim Deal and James Jamerson (2:1 in that order), and childhood companion Patrick Curry curating complementary beats.
It’s another dynamic dimension of Caged Animals, a contemporary pop planet that envelops everything between the ears with a sweet sense of pleasure in it’s paranoia, whilst embracing the sometimes sour nature of human emotion. Across the album the madness makes magical sense.
