Sister, Sister

Think of your favorite hip-hop song, take out the profanities, and replace that thrusting bass line with smooth electronic ambient rhythms, and you're making your way closer into the world of Cocorosie. Sisters Bianca Lellani Casady, nicknamed Coco, and Sierra Rose Casady, nicknamed Rosie, recreate a childlike innocence clashed with harsh adult subtleties using bits and pieces from hip-hop, folk, classical/opera, electronica, and reggae in their most recent album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. The wind-up music box in “Bloody Twins,” the kazoo in “Werewolf,” and the bike bell in “Animals” are a few examples of the creative sound effects that litter each track. There is a simplicity to Bianca’s raspy rhyming spoken/sung words reminiscent of rap that is lifted up by her sister Sierra’s opera-inspired vocal lines drifting out into another realm of angelic sweetness.

These at times magnificently sounding songs each have an element of darkness mixed in. Divorce and separation shaped the sisters’ childhood and it was not until their 20’s that they even became close. Sierra lost touch with Bianca when she was sent to boarding school as a teenager, and she later moved to Paris to study opera. Bianca studied linguistics and sociology, wrote music and pursued art on her own until her artistic soul sent her wandering, and she serendipitously landed at her sisters apartment. The music they wrote together and recorded in Sierra’s bathroom spread through friends and in March 2004 the freshly formed Cocorosie released their successful La Maison de Mon Reve through the Indie label Touch and Go Records, and toured with Ratatat, Bright Eyes, and Devendra Banhart. The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn goes further out on a limb than Cocorosie’s first album in order to further explore what they seem most interested in—mixing together ideas that don’t usually go together, harsh cruelty with happy-go-lucky melody, children’s toys played with harps.

The song “Bloody Twins” slowly creaks along to the chiming of a music box with lyrics about being kissed and turned into roses. “Japan” begins where “Bloody Twins” left off with a wind-up-music-box feeling being cranked faster and then slower, and soon shifts into a reggae sing-along with a surprising pile of heavy lyrics. Cocorosie introduces severe irony in the third verse about Jamaica, which includes the lines "they'll take you home and then they'll rape you” and adds joyfully “but you like it so say thank you." Again they mix their childlike sound with some intense references to war in the fourth verse, "Everybody wants to go to I-raq / but once they go they don't come back / bringing peanut butter jelly, and other snacks / we might have our freedom but we still go down." Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are the trademarks of elementary school lunch boxes, but this image only serves to infantilize the soldiers, making war seem like an exciting field trip from home.

The name of the CD is a bit troubling and ironic also—The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. "The adventures of Ghosthorse" is a little creepy for the ghost reference, but could sound like a viable children's book title, until we get the side-kick to Ghosthorse which is "Stillborn," a dead infant. These women aren't afraid to use some non-PC language and images, and they can't be tossed out with other artists who seem to be experimental for the sake of being experimental. They've got a message here that’s coming out of their messy room of toy instruments and silly-serious lyrics. And they naturally place the unlikely mixture of opera and hip-hop into the same disorderly, but complete family.