It may've been recorded — romantically — in "a tiny apartment
in the
18th district of Paris," but the delightful (if deranged) debut disc for
New Yorker sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady doesn't stir up scenes of
autumnal Parisienne romance. Rather, CocoRosie's idiosyncratic
post-millennial folk music evokes numerous New York City ghosts, their
modernist spirituals stirring the spectres of strange folkies strewn
through the recent pop-cultural past, their ad-hoc patchwork of warbled
voices and incidental noises a sewn séance stitching together imagist
images of different constituents of the sleepless city, from Karen
Dalton in a folk café circa 1961, to Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane
Connors in some dusty loft circa 1981, to Devendra Banhart bunkered down
in a darkened basement circa 2001. All evocations as romantic as Gay
Paris, of course, but only in their own way, the romance here being more
baroque and bizarre than straight-out beautiful. Those beholding the
wonders of CocoRosie need to be blessed with the right eye, the best
ears to hear them being those tuned to the staticky frequencies
broadcast on the musical fringe. At times, the Casady sisters seem to
be comfortably dwelling amongst the Americkn outsider-folk vanguard
currently creeping around the edges of the pop-cultural consciousness —
not just distinct contemporaries of (and comparatives to) Banhart, but
bearing vocal similarities to the other-squeaky voiced wanderers, from
the medieval munchkins of Alva to the Barrett-headed bong-huffers of the
Animal Collective. There are even certain musical similarities to the
Tower Recordings in the way they distil the tuneful with the dissonant.
Yet, to place CocoRosie in a readymade musical context would be to do
disservice to their idiosyncrasy. For an act most notable for their
utter uniqueness, they're best viewed not as part of a greater movement,
but as a strange little happening all of their own, their music a
missive fired from deep within the depths of their own iconoclastic
artistry. On La Maison de Mon Rêve, the girls wail away like tortured
maidens, whilst picked acoustic guitar picks its way through a cottony
field of ghostly groans and rattled chains, as if stirring up the
tortured pasts of tortured spooks. Sensitive to such, their music
reinvents old-timey spirituals with a vicious revisionist twist: irony
infesting an almost-hip-hop-ish chipmunk-soul number filled with
proclamations like "And all I want with my life/ Is to be a housewife"
and "I'd wear your black eyes/ Bake you apple pies," their Haitian love
songs and Tahitian rain songs filled with anti-missionary overtones, and
their Christian folksong just coming out with "Jesus loves me/ But not my
wife/ Not my nigger friends/ Or their nigger lives." And, as far as
coming-outs go, it's hard to recall many musical debutantes of recent
seasons making such an amazing impression.
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