CocoRosie - Hippies with the hype

The word “hype”, in the inscrutable indie galaxy, often has a boomerang effect. It's a launch into orbit without a parachute, a harbinger of ruinous falls. Early success, in other words, can come at a steep price, because, unlike in the mainstream world, plenty of people won't forgive you for it — in fact, they'll hold it against you. Somewhere between the stars and the dust is where the lovely Casady sisters, Sierra and Bianca, aka CocoRosie, ended up.

A blazing start, theirs, with La Maison De Mon Rêve, a debut album counted among the most talked-about musical “cases” of the new millennium. Loved, hated, praised, vilified, the Casady fairies split critics down the middle, but everyone had at least a word to say about them. And above all — which certainly weighed more heavily on their bank balance — they won over audiences, touring the world alongside indie-circuit aces like Bright Eyes, Tv On The Radio, Antony & The Johnsons, Blonde Redhead, Devendra Banhart. 

Over time, however, CocoRosie's stock has rapidly declined. To the point that their artistic merits have taken a back seat to their “extra” activities, from fashion shows to art galleries. Not to mention the gossip about their love lives... Too much hype could kill you? Let's try to get a clearer picture, then, starting possibly from the musical side of the story...

Freaks in search of glory

CocoRosie's debut album is one of those spontaneous prodigies, born of the magic of a moment. At the same time, though, it's a conscious product of its era. An era of relentless revivalism. Sounds from the past — whether the plastic, synthetic pop of the 80s, or kraut rock, or the psychedelic folk of the 60s — have in fact provided the raw material on which the vast majority of pop-rock works of recent years have been built, with artists recycling the most disparate influences, some adding a more pronounced personal touch, others imitating old glories more or less slavishly. Of great importance in this climate of revivalism has always been the North American singer-songwriter tradition, particularly the one stamped with the 60s (from Bob Dylan to Neil Young): perhaps precisely because that approach has already been drawn on so heavily, the newest generation trying their hand at classic songwriting have shifted their focus to other musical paths, taking a step forward (or rather, backward). The source of inspiration has become that primordial folk-country-blues tradition, rooted in the early part of the century, which has left us an invaluable heritage of real music “of the soul”, in name and in fact.

In this rediscovery of the “founding fathers”, New York is, as usual, at the forefront. In the shadow of the Big Apple, in particular, a band of freaks, oddballs, buskers and the like takes shape, promptly labeled by the press as prewar-folk, weird-folk, freak-folk, queer-folk, depending on taste. What they all share is a reclaiming of “primitive” folk, combined with more or less contemporary quirks and gimmicks, whether trip-hop, hip-hop, glitch, avant-pop flavored, and whatever else you want to throw in. Part of this crowd, to varying degrees, are new indie stars such as Devendra Banhart, Faun Fables, Animal Collective, Antony & the Johnsons, Espers, Joanna Newsom. And, indeed, CocoRosie. With musical attitudes that differ in some respects and a strange backstory behind them.

The Mont Martre bedroom

The fates of Sierra and Bianca Casady have been separate since birth: the former comes into the world in Iowa, the latter in Hawaii; united only as children, as they roam across the States with their parents (their mother, a Native American, a teacher and artist; their father an enthusiast of shamanism), they go their separate ways again when Sierra, a gospel singer, flies to Paris to study as a soprano at the conservatory, while Bianca, an aspiring hippie poet, continues her nomadic journey across the Old Continent.

Then, in 2003, the fateful rendez vous: Bianca knocks on her sister's apartment door in Mont Martre, and what might seem like a family reunion over tea and pastries turns into a musical feat. An album recorded in a bedroom, amid clutter, creaking chairs and toys. Or in a bathtub (as the photo shows). With a four-track recorder, a guitar, electronic samples and a few bizarre sounds captured “in the field” (including: a popcorn machine, a coffee maker, a rooster's crow).

La Maison De Mon Rêve came out in 2004, under the name CocoRosie (a name drawn from the two sisters' childhood nicknames), and it's a one-of-a-kind piece of magic. One-of-a-kind for the type of sound achieved, the classic, beautiful and ever-touching bedroom lo-fi, whose structural framework is nevertheless so fragile that it could collapse into a colossal mess at any moment; and one-of-a-kind, too, because it's the expression of a very clear intent to “capture a moment”, the meeting of two sisters raised apart and reunited within four walls to celebrate the event.

Musically, the album moves along two different lines that sometimes stay parallel and sometimes manage to intertwine with surprising results. The first is represented by classically styled songs, often accompanied by nothing but acoustic guitar and background noise: the splendid “Terrible Angels”, the old-fashioned gospel of “Jesus Loves Me”, so divine and so pagan at once, the atmospheric “Good Friday”, all whispers and vocal dis-harmonies, the lyrical-psychotic “Candy Land” and the deeply sad closer, “Lyla”.

The second, which strikes us as more interesting and original, is an unprecedented blend of hip-hop, or rather trip-hop, and lo-fi aesthetics, the whole thing sent travelling back a hundred years in time: try to imagine what Portishead would sound like dead and buried, summoned from beyond the grave via a ouija board for one last glorious show, and you'll get an idea of the style of tracks such as “By Your Side”, where the voice is uncannily similar in attitude to Beth Gibbons', or “Haitian Love Song”, in which, alongside this electronic proto-beat, guitar also appears along with a sort of wah wah achieved who knows how.

The album, precisely because of its very strong sense of “uniqueness”, does raise some doubts about the duo's prospects, however. The hope is that the Casady sisters will above all manage to keep this inspiration intact, and that they'll be able to sharpen their ideas, making the compositional side of the songs themselves more solid, focusing more on the songwriting than on the overall “coolness” of the sound; also because those who can afford to churn out lo-fi albums for ten years while staying at a high level of quality can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In any case, it's a triumph. Of image, first and foremost, but also of substance. Even the harshest, snobbiest critics melt in the face of the lo-fi gospel of the two damsels of Mon Rêve: “What you'd call a small but great album, the kind that will stand the test of time”, Blow-Up declares, with no room for appeal.

The wreck of Noah's Ark

The hype binge, however, comes at a price. Partly because critics start sharpening their pens, able to count on an all-in-all easy target (two ordinary girls, maybe not even accomplished musicians, cute and even with a bit of intellectual pretension), and partly because our two girls get a taste for it and let greed get the better of them. How else to explain the hasty sequel just one year after the fateful breakthrough?

Of course, they explain that the new songs “were born in echo-less bedrooms on different continents, in messy studios full of coffee cups and in ordinary places… chasing the ghosts of pianos sunk into our dreams and the tea-stained echo of our grandmother's singing”. The impression, though, is that they had to strike while the iron was hot, cashing in as much as possible on their lucky momentum.

Conceived once again in France, but also on the road during the tour, Noah's Ark this time features a more meticulous production and a more pronounced rhythmic backbone, as well as a few notable guests. CocoRosie split the duties (Sierra on guitar, flute and vocals, Bianca on percussion and vocals), crafting twelve bedroom folk ballads, seasoned with the usual whirl of found sounds: a toy piano, ringing phones, crying babies, animal noises, music boxes… Enchanted lo-fi nursery rhymes, over which the ghost of Dolly the sheep always seems to hover. Because cloning a spell is a hopeless endeavor. And so the usual mix of naive craft and avant-garde tricks, only intermittently backed up by songwriting equal to the task, often ends up feeling predictable.

So, to relive those thrills that Sierra and Bianca's vocal interplay once gave us, we have to wait for another voice capable of caressing the strings of lightness, that of the angelic Antony, who could load even a weather forecast with pathos and who pours his grace into the piano-led “Beautiful Boyz” (dedicated to French writer Jean Genet), duetting with Bianca's rough-edged timbre. But it feels more like an outtake from “I Am A Bird Now” than a new track credited to CocoRosie.

The Casady sisters' touch, if anything, is felt more in the other notable collaboration, the sensual “Brazilian Sun”, where Devendra Banhart's wandering folkster spirit settles into a highly evocative exotic watercolor: the chirring of strings, the dry tap of percussion, the harmony of interwoven vocals and birdsong in the background color one of the best tracks of the bunch.

Also significant is the contribution of French mc and beat boxer Spleen, who lays down the rhythmic cadences of "K-Hole" and "Bisounours". The melodies that once filled the little room of Mon Rêve, however, seem to have evaporated, lost in the twists and turns of dream-pop merry-go-rounds au ralenti, like the spectral "The Sea Is Calm", marked out by an old, out-of-tune piano, the guitar-and-harp lullaby of "Tekno Love Song", or the dreamlike madness of the waltz "Bear Hides And Buffalo", where Bianca and Sierra's theatrically childlike vocals come to the fore.

The other tracks go by without too many jolts, like a music box running a bit low on wind; only the hip-hop pulses of the title track and the stripped-down gospel of "Armageddon" try to sound a livelier note.

Noah's Ark is an album of atmospheres, living on childhood languor (it's dedicated entirely to Casady's mother), on photos yellowed by time, on mildew and ghosts. It can gently rock you through three quarters of an hour of serene melancholy. What's missing, though, is a "Terrible Angels" able to turn that mood into real emotion. And above all, what's missing is the original spirit, that spark of pure madness that used to make you jump at the slightest thing. After a trip around Noah's Ark, there's no doubt left: what La Maison De Mon Rêve had was truly magic. But perhaps it really was unique and unrepeatable.

Starting Over From Three

Noah's Ark is something of a flop. Early detractors seize the chance to declare the duo already on the ropes, while others hope it was just a bump in the road. Meanwhile, pre-war folk is already a dead man walking: time wears down trends and names alike, burning even those who had legitimately earned some merit. A host of snipers thus lie in wait for CocoRosie at the pass of the third album. In the meantime, Bianca and Sierra have grown up, taken more time before putting out new work, and thrown themselves into various projects: the former founded a production company (Voodoo Eros), through which she also records her sister's other musical project, Metallic Falcons, but that's not all — the two also run an art gallery and their own fashion line.

Amid all this bustle, they also managed to record (in Iceland!) The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn (2007). The album is more decisive in distancing itself from its predecessor, breaking away from the sound that had characterised their earlier work but which already seemed a bit worn out. First of all, the sound is cleaner, less lo-fi and less sketched-out, and the sisters' voices are clear and soaring; the hip-hop influence is strongly foregrounded in the first two tracks, with break-beats and scratching mixing with the characteristic rattles in the background of "Rainbowarriors", while "Promises" dissolves nicely into a quivering, liquid trip-hop backdrop à la Portishead. The following "Bloody Twins" is little more than an interlude (of dubious success) in which a faint voice pushes through a swarm of little bells, while "Japan" surprises with a folk-calypso nursery rhyme interrupted midway, just for a moment, by operatic singing.

After this fine start, though, déjà vu takes over; if "Sunshine" is a delicate poem for voice and sparse piano notes and "Werewolfes" is a folk-pop gem that brilliantly blends Bianca's half-spoken delivery with Sierra's melody, "Black Poppies" is tiresome in its vocal pretensions, and "Animals", with its excessive length, lays bare all the limits of CocoRosie's folk.

For anyone missing them, operatic tones return on "Houses" — though "Raphael" is much better, old-style, yes, but unfolding lightly amid pleasant harp flourishes. Just time for a spoken-word interlude recited by an androgynous voice ("Girl And The Gees") and we're already heading into the home stretch; it's a fine closer, though, "Miracle", a breath, a hint of voice laid gently on a dream-pop cloud, every now and then a caress in the form of light verses sung by Antony who, a modern-day King Midas, seems to enrich whatever he lends his voice to.

The third time around, in short, is a half-successful album, one that can earn a solid pass and some applause, but which should perhaps also push the sweet Bianca and Sierra to focus more deeply on their music, rather than fashion, art and productions, in order to give their style a decisive push and achieve a definitive musical growth.

Oceanic Muddles

So, after a single ("God Has A Voice/She Speaks Through Me", 2008) and a tour-only CD-R ("Cononuts, Plenty Of Junk Food", 2009), both practically ignored by everyone, the duo relaunches in grand style with Grey Oceans, complete with a Sub Pop contract in hand.

The duo confirms they're on exceptional form. The packaging is stylish as ever, the mood is downcast. For CocoRosie, this translates into an exasperated dissociation, true editing muddles: the 1930s-style sketch of "Hopscotch" is a wearying self-parody that aims to blend with jungle music's trance-like pulse, while "R.I.P. Blue Face" is a game of blurred lines between digital hip-hop and an unstable electronic backdrop. Best of all is the unhinged dissertation of "Trinity's Crying".

Middle Eastern, Persian ("Undertaker") and Arabic ("Smokey Taboo") blends sketch out something rhythmic, but for the most part forgo sampled beats and drums. Neoclassical structures like the title track, which fearlessly draws on pianistic new age, and "The Moon Asked The Crow" (a remixed trifle) are excessively stuffed with their beloved mock-operatic flourishes, their little-girl babbling, and their compulsive concrete sound-bashing (the blanket of sampling that chokes the harp on "Gallows"), though by now far more refined in terms of precision.

While it often sounds like nothing more than an oblique form of chart r'n'b, the retro gem here is still "Lemonade". It's no coincidence that after this track CocoRosie go full speed back to assembling new, virtually unresolvable loose ends: the bedroom chatter and techno hiccup of "Fairy Paradise", the proud Suicide-style pulse over the gospel recital of "Here I Come".

Their reliance on an established aesthetic, tried and tested, even snobbish, is a minor apotheosis. As is the old cliché of the classic move to Sub Pop: a misunderstood style trying to broaden its audience.

In 2013, CocoRosie returned with Tales Of A Grass Widow. We would have gladly forgotten them, as happens with every beautiful story that ends badly. Given the superfluous corollary of their inevitable fashion line, the obscene make-up of their latest ventures, or the collateral avant-pop of the negligible Metallic Falcons, nothing would have dissuaded us – except this new work, the least reckless and arrogant record of their entire career. The reckless fans who, above all, had worshipped the Casady sisters' fearsome involution now turn up their noses. We, who had looked on them fondly from the start, allow ourselves a smile. Welcome back, kindness – we can say it. Of all the bizarre schemes piled up over the years to squeeze more money out of gullible fanatics, the only one untouched by profit motives – the Future Feminists collective – seems to have been the most sensible. This album is born as an implicit megaphone for its mission. "On the Side of Girls" could have been its subtitle, echoing the famous essay by a great Italian educator. And looking closely, it is indeed an unusual concept album, an inquiry into the loneliness of the weakest among the weak, victims of abuse in backward settings, forced to cling desperately to a reality transfigured out of necessity. The protagonists are many little girls, raised, like them, with escapism as their only guiding star. So the five-year-old bride who consoles herself watching the grass grow free outside her window, so the little girl comforted by the company of a sparrowhawk, or the young girl who entrusts her denied love to the elderly gravedigger, so that it may be kept in peace by the earth.

A strong common thread, then, one that forced Coco and Rosie to shed their art-gallery extremism in pursuit of the long-neglected goal of lightness. The fairy-tale register returns to favor, and it's a safe harbor, much like yet another heart-wrenching guest appearance by the nightingale-voiced Antony, this time a kind and opulent Mother Nature. The suggestions grow thinner. The background atmospheres gain credit. More than once, the arrangements edge toward glitch-pop, caressing the skin without scratching it. CocoRosie haven't given up on their Icelandic mentor Valgeir Sigurðsson, nor on the vast array of clichés they used with him when recording the controversial The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn: the mournful tone of the piano, the synthetic gurgles, Bianca's Bjork-isms and Sierra's operatic ambitions. It's all handled with the poise that was missing back then, and which now makes even the affected romanticism in the younger sister's sulky delivery enjoyable – evidently something ineradicable.

Contrasts remain their bread and butter, and the same goes for their skill in delivering refrains as simple as they are devastating. Of course, when Rosie's celestial flourishes are led astray by Coco's usual rap stew or by their friend Tez's lurching noise-making, one can only conclude that it's kitsch we're talking about once again, and it couldn't be otherwise. But this time the dose of pastiche is just right, the blend works, the electronic scraps don't bully their way through like neighborhood thugs, and the bravado remains a memory to be put under glass, consigned to the oblivion of a ghost track appropriately tucked out of sight. Sierra's adult voice and Bianca's capricious-child voice, two souls merging once again in harmony. An encounter, not a clash, a desire to break through with the same intact naturalness of that sweltering August in a Parisian bathroom. The sky, which had darkened even the oceans, its patient neighbors across the way, seems desperately in need of rediscovering the bright gaiety of its lost color.

The good news, for us, is that perhaps we'll soon fall in love again.

As was only natural, over time interest in the sisters' sweet, oddball fantasies waned, and although the two kept releasing albums almost every two years up to 2015, they couldn't sustain the pace, and their inspiration suffered as a result.

So they took some time, the longest gap ever between two of their releases: five years that clearly did the Brooklyn-based sisters' ideas a world of good. The desire to get back in the game is evident right from the artwork chosen for the cover of Put The Shine On, a photograph in which the mischievous duo appear decked out like two late-Victorian cabaret performers. The sound, too, has been partly refreshed: the usual freak-folk veils and lo-fi filters (still central to tracks like "Mercy" and the theatrical "Slow Down Sun Down") are torn open by bolder arrangements, with pianos and other keyboards driving the melodies ("Restless", "Did Me Wrong").

Hip hop cadences are also on the agenda, as in "Restless" and the phantasmagoric "Burning Down The House". The syncopated "Smash My Head" even unleashes those electro blasts that Grimes didn't dare push further on her last record. The album's listenability is somewhat undermined by its excessive length (55 minutes), not always backed by tracks of equal quality, a byproduct likely of Bianca and Sierra's zeal and their renewed appetite for a challenge. Given the theatrical potential and the freshness of the two sisters' vocal interplay, it will be very interesting to catch them live during the next festival season.

Twenty-one years on from that fateful rendez-vous in a Montmartre bedroom, which produced the fortunate debut of sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady, comes Little Death Wishes (2025), which brings in some notable guests, such as Gael Rakotondrabe on piano, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof on percussion, and Chance The Rapper, but is once again built around the feverish dialogue between Sierra (author of most of the lyrics) and Bianca. Twelve tracks tackle complex themes, such as women's generational struggles, the precariousness of existence and the "little death wishes" of the title, romantic disillusionment, and that constant (and tormented) bond with childhood that has always been the duo's defining trait. And from childhood, CocoRosie bring that innocent chaos which makes seemingly disjointed, fragmentary tracks so intriguing, like the opening "Wait For Me", a sort of electronic madrigal carried along crooked rhythms by Saunier, as if mimicking an uneven, breathless heartbeat that matches the childlike tremor of Bianca's falsetto singing.

The sounds – as ever hyper-contaminated and smeared with hefty injections of field recordings – often verge on the playful, rarefied electronics of early Bjork, as in the fine single "Cut Stitch Scar", where the dulling, limping beat seems almost to evoke the scars of the title, while Bianca's quavering voice wonders how to piece back together a shattered reality ("Could I fix the broken parts?"). Everything is constantly fragmented, disjointed, as in the lopsided lullaby of "Least I Have You", where, amid an out-of-tune piano and a grainy synth, Sierra's voice lays down a veil of dreamy sorrow, or amid the aggressive pulses of keyboards and drum machine in "Nothing But Garbage".

On other occasions, the album brushes against an estranged hip-hop ("Paper Boat", "Nothing Buy Garbage"), sealed by Chance The Rapper's featuring on "Girl In Town", one of the best tracks on offer, built on a dissonant loop of toy piano and broken-up beats that clash sweetly with Chance's warm, melancholic flow, while CocoRosie conjure up a wandering female figure, caught between fairy-tale echoes and raw urban reality. A dark mood that returns in the even more intense "Pushing Daisies", minimal electronic bedroom pop in service of a story of intergenerational trauma and family dysfunction.

Evocative and intimate, the weird-pop of Little Death Wishes won't win Bianca and Sierra any new fans, but it confirms their skill in moving through that liminal space between fairy tale and reality, between childhood innocence and the lacerations of adulthood, with that touch of controlled lo-fi acting as a connecting thread back to their beginnings. A mature, self-aware synthesis of CocoRosie's artistic journey, confirming the duo's ability to explore new sonic frontiers while retaining a crooked elegance and a recognizable identity. Imperfect and chaotic, like pretty much all their records, but perhaps all the more intriguing for it.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Grey Oceans"), Stefano Ferreri ("Tales Of A Grass Widow"), Michele Corrado ("Put The Shine On")

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