Released on 09/04/07
Label: Touch & Go

When US bands want to sound more American, they often default to Springsteen-esque blue collar stadium rock. Strange, in a country that prides itself on being a cultural melting pot, that such a purebred white genre should come to be the sound of the American Dream. CocoRosie represent a different take on the classic story of dispossessed wanderers made good: half Cherokee, they spent their childhoods being trailed round the States by their artist mother before being split up in their early teens. Sierra ended up in Paris, training to be an opera singer, while Bianca studied linguistics and sociology in New York and got into hip-hop.

In 2003, Bianca showed up without warning on her sister's doorstep, after an estrangement of 10 years, and they've been making bizarre electro freak-folk ever since. Their sound is simple, insular propelled gently by piano, harp, drum machine, and the sister's unique and complementary voices (Sierra's water-pure soprano; Bianca's eerie Ono-esque squalls). Nonetheless, it incorporates folk, vaudeville, Native tribal chants, hip-hop, calypso and opera, blurring boundaries of class, race and genre in a weird hallucinatory dreamstate.

Opening track "Rainbow Warriors" is their boho manifesto. Not just the name of Greenpeace's whale-saving ship, the term refers to a legend of a Hopi prophecy that a time would come when the Earth was poisoned, and the keepers of the rituals and myths, the rainbow warriors, would restore all the tribes of mankind to health. Or as CocoRosie put it: "Rainbowarriors (sic) are on a crusade for the kind of drug-free America where the elected officials are tranny shaman (sic) and the religious leaders are winged evangelists who speak in tongues of Happy Core."

Erk. There are rewards if you stick with them through the art-speak, though. The album is structurally stronger and more confident in its vocals than predecessors "Noah's Ark" and "La Maison De Mon Reve", benefiting from the production of Bjork collaborator Valgeir Sigurdsson, which adds a clarity and a drive hitherto absent. "Japan" is strongest of all, a demented "Muppet Show" calypso romp, dominated by Bianca's strange guttural rhyming. There is a childishness about CocoRosie's sound (their moniker comes from their childhood nicknames), but rather than a tame tweeness, it's the dark perversity of a genuinely infantile imagination.

Not that there aren't moments of very adult, even political lucidity, as with Bianca's mocking: "Everybody wants to go to Iraq, But once they do they don't come back, Bring you peanut butter jelly and other snacks, We might have our freedom but we still on crack." Occasionally, as on "Black Poppies" or the Devendra Banhart-penned "Houses", they're still prone to a bit of aimless rambling: like their friend and fellow arty prodigy Patrick Wolf, it would be good to see them branch even further out. For now, though, the sound of their American bad dream is sweet enough.

    by Emily Mackay