...Coco Rosie?
Sister sledgehammer: So you think all folk-singing girls are flower-smelling hippy chicks in big frocks, warbling on about fluffy clouds and bunny rabbits? Well, think again. Bianca and Sierra Casady are two sisters with a folksy vision, but it doesn't include dancing barefoot in meadows or kissing the sky. The cover of CocoRosie's new album, Noah's Ark, depicts a bizarre unicorn threesome – not quite the sort of thing you'd expect to see on summer lawns. The ladies themselves are no less bizarre: they look like a New Age Shakespeare's Sister gone loco, and they sound like a strange amalgam of Ella Fitzgerald, Mary Margaret O'Hara and a very scary witch. Nevertheless, the duo have gained fans through support slots with Devendra Banhart, Bright Eyes and Blonde Redhead, and attracting the likes of Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnsons to sing on one of their tracks, Beautiful Boyz. Now the experimental-electro-indiefolk sisters are coming to Dublin, and they intend to show the crosslegged brigade what happens when the weird turn pro.
No way sis: Cherokee blood runs through the Casady sisters' veins; their dad was a shaman; mom was a teacher and artist. Sierra was born in Iowa and Bianca was born in Hawaii; their parents divorced when they were very small, and the girls lived a peripatetic childhood, their dad bringing them to visit reservations around the US every summer, their mom moving them from one state to another whenever the whim took her. To complicate matters, the two sisters hated each other, and couldn't wait to grow up so they could go their separate ways. At 20, Sierra wanted to be an opera singer, so she moved to France and enrolled in the Paris Conservatory. Meanwhile, Bianca was living in Brooklyn, writing songs, painting pictures, and getting tattooed. Ever restless, she travelled around the world, eventually fetching up in Paris, where she rang her estranged sister in Montmartre.
Ladies and gents: Sierra was bemused at this sudden visit from the younger sister she hardly knew, but before long the pair were bonding over bottles of champagne, roll-up ciggies and shared childhood memories. They would lock themselves in the bathroom for hours on end, using the echoey acoustics to record their songs on a little four-track. Sierra sang and played guitar and flute, while Bianca sang and did percussion. Eventually, they emerged with an album, La Maison de Mon Rêve, and handed out copies of it to their friends in Paris and NY. Indie label Touch and Go got wind of CocoRosie, and the album received a proper release.
Coco pops: When Sierra and Bianca were children, their nicknames were Coco and Rosie. Their music also harks back to a lost innocence, using kids' toys and nursery rhyming couplets to evoke an eerily twisted infantility. CocoRosie will be soundtracking your childhood nightmares at Whelan's on December 3rd.
Kevin Courtney
