Their third release represents another stride onward from previous works, where the girls continue to experiment with their disparate voices and clashing personalities, juxtaposing devastating ballads like "Werewolf" with exhilarating tracks like "Japan" and the jaunty single "Rainbowarriors". It's a lush, orchestral array of sounds and beauty; a vaudevillian opera, if you will.
February 20, 2007,
Michael D. Ayers, N.Y.
Rock duo CocoRosie will unveil its third studio album, "The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn," April 10 via Touch & Go. The 12-song set was recorded in a barn in the south of France and in a more conventional studio in Iceland. "We worked on it the whole year, and wove everything together," Bianca Casady tells Billboard.com. "But the actual album itself was recorded over a lot of disjointed sessions.
For years, CocoRosie has been incorporating a hip-hop element into their live act, and "Ghosthorse" is their first record to bring that sound into the studio. "I don't know if it was a natural progression, but we've been imagining our songs in more of a club setting," Casady says. "A handful of these new songs we've been doing live for awhile, but others, we're still trying to figure out."
This also marks the first time CocoRosie worked with a producer, tapping Bjork engineer and producer Valgeir Sigursson. And although the title hints at a concept album, Casady swears it is not. "There's no fixed story, but there are different alluding points; there's a lot of ghost stuff going on," she says.
CocoRosie is prepping for a short string of shows in Europe, before heading back to the United States in April. From there, they'll embark on a cross-country headlining tour, making their debut at this year's Coachella Festival.
Review by by Joe-John Coxhead on 27/02/2007
Bianca from CocoRosie has an unconventional voice and in the past, the band have made more use of the harp. Just as Joanna Newsom has recently found success with that combination, CocoRosie are bravely moving on. At times, 'The Adventures...' sees them go hip-hop, with bolder beats and Bianca proto-rapping. This sounds great, with the exception of 'Japan' and it's chorus..."Everybody just hold hands". Even the most ardent tree-hugger would surely find this repeated refrain annoying.
'Werewolf' is much better, with it's musical swing and beat-y lyrics..."I don't mean to close the door/ but for the record, my heart is sore/ you blew through me like bullet holes/ left stains on my sheets and stains on my soul". "Porn-y movies make me reminisce" they sing on 'Animals', the next song returns to this theme, with typical lyrical skill..."Can't just rub him out, like the mob used to do so, like memories of porno and tea-stains and tobacco".
What follows, 'Houses' is the starkest tune on 'The Adventures...', with just a piano, the sisters Casady and a coin being flipped. This adds weight to Bianca's "He loves me, he loves me not" lament..."Don't you love your baby? Tell me"
Production comes from Valgeir Sigurosson, who also worked on Bjork's 'Vespertine'. Like that album the closing track here, 'Miracle' creates a womb-like, sleepy warmth, with a Johnson-less Antony having the final say.
Review by Heather Phares
It would be very easy for CocoRosie to make merely ornamental music and focus only on the pretty, ethereal sound that was so charming on La Maison de Mon Reve. Fortunately, Sierra and Bianca Casady have more ambition than that, and they've managed to craft very different identities for each of their albums -- no small feat, especially since their approach is so distinctive. On The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, they combine the cleanest, most polished-sounding production to appear on a CocoRosie album with a stark hip-hop influence, making this the duo's most focused, and strangest, album yet. The sisters explore this polarity throughout The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, opening the album with the bold, jaunty beats of "Rainbow Warriors" and following it with the much more delicate trip-hop of "Promise." Switching back and forth between mischievous, endearingly awkward moments and one of breathtaking beauty like day and night, or waking and dreaming, it's almost as if the album posits each of the Casadys' talents as opposing viewpoints. The tracks Bianca takes the lead on are bright and outrageous, like "Japan," which bounces along like the Mad Hatter's tea party as she sings, "Everybody wants to go to Iraq/But once you go there, you don't come back." The song's topsy-turvy feel only deepens when Sierra's eerie background vocals turn into a cheery trumpet melody. Meanwhile, "Black Poppies" and the other songs Sierra dominates delve even deeper into the narcotic chansons of La Maison de Mon Reve and Noah's Ark. Her singing on The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn is her finest yet, especially on the middle-of-the-day lullaby "Sunshine" and "Miracle," where she has much more power and range than some of her previous kitten-ish Billie Holiday impersonations would suggest. The playful arrangements that are so vital to CocoRosie's sound come into sharper focus on this album, too, with a toy box's worth of sound effects adding poignancy and whimsy to "Animals" and harp and trumpet deepening "Raphael"'s mournful beauty. The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn's densely packed sounds and ideas are a lot to process, but they're what makes this album rewarding on repeated listens -- and what makes CocoRosie's yin-yang, fractured fairy tale sound still surprising three albums into their career.
CocoRosie
The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
[Touch & Go; 2007]
Rating: 2.3
At least they might not get lumped in with freak folk anymore. Backstory-rich Brooklyn duo CocoRosie brighten the sylvan hip-hop warble of their divisive earlier efforts with higher recording fidelity and Maurice Sendakian twee-pop instrumentation on their bloated third LP The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, the most tellingly titled concept album since the Dandy Warhols imploded for 2005's Odditorium or Warlords of Mars. Don't worry, CocoRosie are still friends with Devendra Banhart, Icelandic guys who engineer Bjork records, and other people much cooler than you.
Too bad it seems as if the more self-impressed CocoRosie sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady get about transcending genres, the less patience they have for mere mortal concerns like, um, songs. True, Ghosthorse and Stillborn begins with CocoRosie at their most radio-ready, on single "Rainbowarriors", where Bianca speak-sings impishly about finding "the rainbow trail that's deep inside ya" over beatbox schmaltz. It's something like Vitamin C's 1999 Top 40 hit "Graduation (Friends Forever)", only with neighing horses, buzzing synths, and Sierra's operatic soprano instead of Pachelbel-derived orchestral Radio Disney pomp/circumstance. Next, "Promise" is the record's most direct engagement with hip-hop, Bianca rapping about "carry[ing] this carapace" and "burnt silver brushed lavender offspring" with the unhurried flow of late-90s UK figures like Faithless emcees Rollo and Maxi Jazz. Think Joanna Newsom with shittier pot and nobody to edit her.
More often, though, Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings: The indecipherable music-box aria of "Bloody Twins", the babyish moocow soundscape of "Black Poppies", and the Banhart-penned piano moroseness of "Houses". ("Big houses burn down," Sierra sings to the rafters.) A Johnsons-less Antony turns in a typically tremulous guest vocal on finale "Miracle", with a simple "I'll be your girl/ I'll be your boy" refrain tailor-made for incoherent gender-theory theses. On spoken-word fragment "Girl and the Geese", an Antony-like male voice intones, "As she did so, she turned into a geese/ It was then revealed that the other geese she magically had understood were once human like her," apparently under the influence of whichever drugs cause a grown man not to know the word "goose." I mean, it's never "duck, duck, geese," is it?
Alas, this album gets much, much worse. Bianca dons an unbearable Sebastian-the-singing-crab Jamaican accent for the loping harp-calypso of "Japan", in which she: 1) Steps into the Six Flags-length queue of weak singers who've seen fit to remind us "life is like a rollercoaster," 2) Blithely parodies/paraphrases the Bobby Knight take on rape (i.e., "say, 'thank you!'"), 3) Offers some vapid chirps about the war in Iraq, and 4) Enjoins us, "Everybody, just hold hands." Sierra's classically trained vocal scales waft out of nowhere to interrupt the unholy proceeding, as if producer Valgeir Sigur?sson (Bjork, Will Oldham) hit pause while walking past a university music building.
Despite the troupe's avant-garde raiment, CocoRosie's lyrics rarely get past art-school cliche. On "Animals", Bianca makes empty, free-associative leaps from the Mafia to porno to tobacco to "a mini-disastro, bigger than the Ice Age/ Don't know if baby dinosaurs maybe could live through it/ Or Indians and butterflies/ What's crushed is my spirit/ Oh, I fear it is too fragile."
Father-conflicted "Werewolf" starts with a male voice describing a dream of being a werewolf, before Bianca proudly declares supposed shock'n'awe lines like "I suck dick" beside such trite juxtapositions as "stains on my sheets and stains on my soul" and lousy music writer words like "coruscate." Other people's dreams can be beautifully told, as in Michel Gondry films or Cocteau Twins LPs, but most of the time they're just boring: Some dude tells me he had a nightmare about his boss turning into a mule-hung Valkyrie (TMI, bro), and I'm all, yeah, let me tell you about the dream I had snorting sea monkeys with Billy Corgan. It takes craft to overcome this fundamentally human "meh"; CocoRosie have ambition instead.
-Marc Hogan, April 19, 2007
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