Available on: Sub Pop LP
In a way, reviewing a CocoRosie record is a pointless task. Four albums in to the Casady sisters’ musical career, most will have already heard their work, and most will have already made up their mind as to whether they think it’s any good or not. Grey Oceans, that fourth album, features many of the band’s divisive idiosyncrasies, but finds the duo applying them more to dance music foundations than before, and even reining some of them in.
CocoRosie’s child-like folk has always nodded to hip-hop – through beatboxing, scratch samples and quasi-rapping – but Grey Oceans’ ‘Hopscotch’ treads new ground, interrupting swift drum’n’bass rhythms with bar-room piano and Bianca’s gurgled, baby-ish vocals. The final results aren’t as far as you might expect from dBridge, Instra:mental and ASC’s softer tracks.
‘R.I.P. Burn Face’ and ‘The Moon Asked the Cow’ have their scattered instrumentation and glass-cut melodies rooted in past CocoRosie, but are built on drum machine tracks that could have felt out of place on previous albums. The less subtle ‘Fairy Paradise’ might feature operatic backing vocals, but it’s scarily close to big room house, and I’m not sure that’s good. Closer ‘Here I Come’ gets the balance right, with a cut-up, round-edged vocal as the beat, and loud, loose piano and spoken word as the track’s emphasis.
‘Lemonade’ adds boogie-leaning synths to the mix, along with trumpet, while the Casadys still excel on piano-led tragedies like ‘Undertaker’. The wispish ‘Gallows’ peers in and out of fog like a cut from Sierra’s 2006 album with Metallic Falcons, and Bianca gives a stunning performance that’s somewhere between Joanna Newsom and Tom Waits on ‘Grey Oceans’. I don’t know what “I’m watching myself / like an old movie on colour TV” really means, but it’s far from the most suspect lyric that’s featured on a CocoRosie song.
In a way, Grey Oceans is CocoRosie’s most accessible album to date: vocally, there’s nothing as abrasive as ‘Japan’, from last album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, though the rapping on tracks like ‘The Moon Asked the Cow’ is still going to invoke hate. There’s also nothing as instantly gratifying here as ‘Werewolf’, ‘Happy Eyez’ or ‘By Your Side’, but given time Grey Oceans reveals itself as an LP with a lot of merit and a lot of strange beauty; one that’s a lot better than the last album, and might prove to be at least as good as Noah’s Ark. Let’s knock off ½ because I’m biased, and call it a 3.5.
Tom Lea
Pingback: Tracks of the month: May – FACT magazine: music and art