COCOROSIE: NOAH’S ARK (REVIEW)
October 13th 2006 12:00
COCOROSIE
NOAH’S ARK
(2005; TOUCH & GO)
RATING:
TRACK LISTING: 1) K-Hole / 2) Beautiful Boyz / 3) South 2nd / 4) Bear Hides And Buffalo / 5) Tekno Love Song / 6) The Sea Is Calm / 7) Noah’s Ark / 8) Milk / 9) Armageddon / 10) Brazilian Sun / 11) Bisounours / 12) Honey Or Tar / 13) Oh Sailor
CocoRosie are the musical equivalent of Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 horror movie, Basket Case. The group is comprised of the Casady sisters: Sierra (Rosie) and Bianca (Coco). Sierra is a multi-instrumentalist with a haunting, classically trained voice; Bianca sings like a retarded kid with the flu, lives in a basket, and kills people. They’re not twins, but they still have a weird symbiotic relationship; creating a lo-fi, freak-folk sound of tinkling music-box melodies, drum loops and beatboxing, inappropriate samples, and surreal and sometimes racially offensive lyrics. The result is something like a Bjork album if the Icelandic imp spent a year listening to nothing but Ween.
Apart from the difference in singing style, I’m not really sure how the band dynamic works between the Casady sisters, or if one of them is in fact a murderous claymation monster. What I do know is that there’s a bipolar tug-of-war to their music: both hauntingly beautiful, and annoyingly cute—and it’s often hard to distinguish these elements from one another. While I may sound a little harsh towards Bianca (she certainly doesn’t look like a deformed monster), there’s gotta be something seriously wrong upstairs to make music like this. Nevermind, I think it’s Bianca's fucked-up, often unintelligible gurglings that make Noah’s Ark (2006) the unique listen that it is.
The highlight for me, “Bear Hides and Buffalo,” is a song that everyone seems to loathe. It consists of a sickly sweet vocal from Bianca laid on top of a dinky little piano line, ghostly operatic vocal from Sierra, and samples of a kitten miaowing and neighing horsies that pop up at seemingly random moments. It’s unsettling and irritating, but that’s what’s so great about it. It sounds like a secret whispered to you by a kid with Down Syndrome sitting next to you on a crowded bus ride through a haunted fairytale forest. It makes you feel uncomfortable, but you put up with it because if you don’t you’ll look like a heartless asshole, and by doing so you end up experiencing something pure and magical. Most of the other songs have a similar push-pull between cutesy bullshit and eerie beauty, but “Bear Hides” seems to be the one that nails this feeling most consistently.
I’ve gotta admit, I haven’t heard CocoRosie’s apparently wonderful debut, La Maison de Mon Reve (2004), but Noah’s Ark supposedly delves further into the weirdness that album only hinted at—so far so that it has turned off a lot of critics. These critics are right in a way: the album does veer into some unbearably precious and unfocussed horseshit. But when the sisters pull this playful experimental style off, it’s pretty fantastic. And yes, there’s some more straightforward tracks like the spare and fragile “Tekno Love Song,” the foreboding and dreamy “The Sea is Calm," and the rickety gospel of "Armageddon" that show what the girls can do when they go easy on the psychedelic gimmicks and use their talents to serve the songs themselves. But if this is indicative of their debut album, then the more fucked-up stuff shows an exciting way forward for the girls.
I wouldn’t fret for the Casady sisters too much. While they make some seriously dumb and deformed music, they get to create their art in boho apartments in premier cities around the world, can most likely get into any club they want to, and they hang out with hip indie-world types like Devendra Banhart and Antony from Antony and the Johnsons (both who appear on the album: the former adding barely discernible vocals to “Brazilian Sun,” and the latter lending his warbling to “Beautiful Boyz,” a tune inspired by the life of Jean Genet). If Bianca is in fact a contorted mutant, she’s living a pretty good life, and it’ll do Sierra good to keep her around and keep the music interesting.
You might be able to separate freaks like this at birth, but doing so can result in some pretty fucked up consequences. Noah’s Ark is one of them.
***
IMAGES
Noah’s Ark*
* images on this page were taken from the following Wikipedia page:
Noah’s Ark
NOAH’S ARK
(2005; TOUCH & GO)
RATING:
TRACK LISTING: 1) K-Hole / 2) Beautiful Boyz / 3) South 2nd / 4) Bear Hides And Buffalo / 5) Tekno Love Song / 6) The Sea Is Calm / 7) Noah’s Ark / 8) Milk / 9) Armageddon / 10) Brazilian Sun / 11) Bisounours / 12) Honey Or Tar / 13) Oh Sailor
Noah's Ark (2005): Three unicorns, fucking eachother, with one throwing up. That's just bloody charming that is.
Apart from the difference in singing style, I’m not really sure how the band dynamic works between the Casady sisters, or if one of them is in fact a murderous claymation monster. What I do know is that there’s a bipolar tug-of-war to their music: both hauntingly beautiful, and annoyingly cute—and it’s often hard to distinguish these elements from one another. While I may sound a little harsh towards Bianca (she certainly doesn’t look like a deformed monster), there’s gotta be something seriously wrong upstairs to make music like this. Nevermind, I think it’s Bianca's fucked-up, often unintelligible gurglings that make Noah’s Ark (2006) the unique listen that it is.
The highlight for me, “Bear Hides and Buffalo,” is a song that everyone seems to loathe. It consists of a sickly sweet vocal from Bianca laid on top of a dinky little piano line, ghostly operatic vocal from Sierra, and samples of a kitten miaowing and neighing horsies that pop up at seemingly random moments. It’s unsettling and irritating, but that’s what’s so great about it. It sounds like a secret whispered to you by a kid with Down Syndrome sitting next to you on a crowded bus ride through a haunted fairytale forest. It makes you feel uncomfortable, but you put up with it because if you don’t you’ll look like a heartless asshole, and by doing so you end up experiencing something pure and magical. Most of the other songs have a similar push-pull between cutesy bullshit and eerie beauty, but “Bear Hides” seems to be the one that nails this feeling most consistently.
I’ve gotta admit, I haven’t heard CocoRosie’s apparently wonderful debut, La Maison de Mon Reve (2004), but Noah’s Ark supposedly delves further into the weirdness that album only hinted at—so far so that it has turned off a lot of critics. These critics are right in a way: the album does veer into some unbearably precious and unfocussed horseshit. But when the sisters pull this playful experimental style off, it’s pretty fantastic. And yes, there’s some more straightforward tracks like the spare and fragile “Tekno Love Song,” the foreboding and dreamy “The Sea is Calm," and the rickety gospel of "Armageddon" that show what the girls can do when they go easy on the psychedelic gimmicks and use their talents to serve the songs themselves. But if this is indicative of their debut album, then the more fucked-up stuff shows an exciting way forward for the girls.
I wouldn’t fret for the Casady sisters too much. While they make some seriously dumb and deformed music, they get to create their art in boho apartments in premier cities around the world, can most likely get into any club they want to, and they hang out with hip indie-world types like Devendra Banhart and Antony from Antony and the Johnsons (both who appear on the album: the former adding barely discernible vocals to “Brazilian Sun,” and the latter lending his warbling to “Beautiful Boyz,” a tune inspired by the life of Jean Genet). If Bianca is in fact a contorted mutant, she’s living a pretty good life, and it’ll do Sierra good to keep her around and keep the music interesting.
You might be able to separate freaks like this at birth, but doing so can result in some pretty fucked up consequences. Noah’s Ark is one of them.
***
IMAGES
Noah’s Ark*
* images on this page were taken from the following Wikipedia page:
Noah’s Ark
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