| · Brilliant freaks.
A pair of New York sisters relocated to Paris, CocoRosie sound like those cuddly animals from Cinderella warped by Billie Holiday, Portishead and street-corner hip-hop all drowned in boxed wine. Armed with a toybox full of noisy kiddie instruments (pull the string and it talks!), jingle bells (and sometimes keys), medicine bottles (shaken, dig?), all of five or six guitar chords (all you need), and anchored by a Parisian beat-boxer, CocoRosie somehow sound like legends.
Key Words: Untrained, untouched, totally unique.
"By Your Side" is gorgeously heartbreaking – a promise to "wear your black eyes/ make you apple pies/ I just want to be your housewife," that sounds like cartoon sparrows re-enacting The Color Purple. "Lyla" outlines one man's attempt to, "buy me for a hundred euro," reminding our narrator of Lukas Moodysson's brutal child prostitution film Lilja 4-Ever. Few could make the lines, "Where was I from you said/ You guessed Yugoslavia/ It's not Yugoslavia at all," fly, let alone as monumentally as they do here. In the same vein, the tiny-short "Not For Sale" holds as heavy a message ("You can leave me on the corner where you found me") and tells it all in just a sliver over a minute.
The future already looks brilliantly bleak and funereal for CocoRosie and despite its occasional darkness, La maison de mon reve is this year's most romantic record – righteous salvation at the hands of a toy orchestra.
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