(2010)
CocoRosie by nature make incredibly divisive music which tends to evoke strong love/hate relationships with its listeners. The atmospheres and worlds they are able to create and evoke are fascinating. However, the extreme affectations and highly questionable pretension they have the tendency to over-exert tend to be extremely off-putting. Few artists can illicit such strong feelings, and this may be just what keeps me coming back to check out what CocoRosie has to say. As with their previous albums, the listener will either love or detest them. This album won’t change anything in this department ; though many devotees of their past work have complained that Grey Oceans is more a rehashing of very similar material. Much has also been said about their inaccessibility and disregard for their audience. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, that’s a pretty good thing. There’s no rule that music must be made to please the audience. There’s no rule stating that fringe artists such as CocoRosie et al. are required to try to please anyone. This is their party, and they can weird it up if they want to.
The initial First Listen of a CocoRosie album can sometimes make the listener instantly detest what they’re hearing, and Grey Oceans arguably poses the biggest challenge yet. It’s hard enough to get past the atrocious cover art alone. There is something about it that brings to mind a more daring Tori Amos album cover of the recent past minus the angelic, ethereal shenanigans. The cover displays them in hooded felt capes with Japanese hermit medicine man beards combined with the worst fake gothic typeface potentially ever seen outside of a few Kansas City, Kansas Christian rap albums circa 1994. It is a definite sign of an unstable economy when indie darling, art rockers such as CocoRosie can go from Pierre & Gilles (2007, Adventures of Ghost Horse and Stillborn) to this-Photoshopped-by-a-stoned 8th grader excuse for album art.
The beginning of the album offers up their more standard form of lo-fi, eclectic beats combined with the sounds that you might hear whilst wondering through a Nature & Discovery mall shop or New Age store playing lilting Peruvian flute music over the speakers. Hopscotch and its schizty, vaudeville chant stays persistently in your head playing on constant rotation the second after you are done listening to it, be forewarned. Sierra’s pseudo operatic warblings and the fast-paced computer drum blips seems clumsily merged with Bianca’s wacked-out vaudeville rag. This takes away from what could potentially be an interesting song. However, it just sounds like two totally different songs mashed together awkwardly. Undertaker is when these two opposite dichotomies really do benefit and bounce off each other. Witchy, jangly, Josephine Fosteresque vocals and thick beats (when done well) evoke amazingly incredible, sublime, gothic Victorian imagery. They are at their best when they exhibit a certain amount of restraint while working together. When the restraint can be summoned up, the troubling, annoying tendencies can be kept in check. Bianca’s affected ‘lil girl/Gremlin baby croak and Sierra’s over-done (not to mention pretty painfully bad) opera singing can bounce fantastically off one another so long as certain choices are allowed to be made. Unfortunately, these choices are not made enough. This record more or less had me up until its title track. The introspective, gospel-tinged ballad of Grey Oceans is bogged down with ridiculous lyrics that sound as if they’re trying too hard to come off as naïve. It’s like seeing artwork painted purposefully in the manner a child would by an artist who just received their Masters degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. With terms such as “hairy hair”, feeling like you are starring in an “old movie on a color TV”, and explaining that “when people whisper in Portuguese it’s just as mysterious” (though probably not to people who speak it, I would have to imagine) with background sounds of bells, toy pianos, and strings it feels like listening to the oral equivalent of eating a giant moldy wedding cake. If Paris Hilton were trying to go art-hippy and write stream-of-consciousness poems, they just might happen to be similar in style to this song. With that being said, all of us have our strengths and weaknesses and in this case, they were reaching a little too far beyond their limits. Until a more coherent and musically structured style is achieved, they need to leave these sweeping piano ballads to the likes of those who can compose a somewhat more linear structure. Nina Simone, this is not. Thankfully, the tempo gears back up in the brilliant baroque hip hop of Moon asked the Crow, giving you a good idea of what Witch Rap would sound like if that genre existed (maybe CocoRosie are the pioneers of this). The sublime Lemonade is the stand-out track of this album. The video is a must-see and goes on to further validate the existence of Witch Rap or Miss Havisham Neo-Blues. This is by far their most accomplished, realized, and mature effort to date. It is spot-on perfect and all the right instrumental choices are made. The choice of cuing the trumpets at just the right swelling moment is wonderful. Gallows also stays within this world of neo-Victoriana, conjuring up the feeling of having a tea party in the overgrown garden of a haunted Edwardian manor house.
When I saw the title of the song Fairy Paradise, I said to myself, “Do they really have a song called this ?! Really ?!” Oh yes, they do. After hearing the actual lyrics : “trance music makes the fairies dance”, I had to pause and wonder for a moment to make sure I wasn’t somehow transported to a Radical Faerie Gathering somewhere on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina circa 1999. This is not really a bad thing, per se, but not really a good thing either. The final track, Here I Come sounds like the Chipettes on ecstasy-laced laughing gas singing at an olden day church tent revival. Yet again, the same English Grammar-Challenged Deep Throated Ghoul (who we first met in Adventures of Ghost Horse and Stillborn and referred to ‘gooses’) makes a special cameo appearance. This time Deep Throat Ghoul shudders out the phrase, “pussy wussy willow” conjuring up instant associations of Kathleen Turner’s quietly seething with pent-up rage character in John Waters’ Serial Mom.
Then it all ends suddenly. It is not really a sad or happy ending. You somehow feel grateful for it all the same. Journeying through Grey Oceans makes the listener feel like Pip coming up against a two-headed version of Estella who may reluctantly allow you to enter Miss Havisham’s mansion. Like them or hate them, they have the power to conjure up a hell of a universe.