CocoRosie - Tales Of A Grass Widow

        Label.........................: CocoRosie
        Genre.........................: Indie
        StoreDate.....................: May-28-2013
        Source........................: CDDA
        Grabber.......................: Exact Audio Copy (Secure Mode)
        Encoding Scheme...............: Lame 3.98.4 V0 VBR Joint-Stereo
        Size..........................: 95.22 MB
        Total Playing Time............: 59:57

        Release Notes:

        CocoRosie have impressive staying power for a band that has frequently
        incorporated repellence into its style, tempering their perversity with
        enough weird beauty to keep us on the hook. On 2004 debut La maison de
        mon rΩve, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady meowed warped endearments
        over freak folk guitars and hip-hop beats. It's their sparest and
        loveliest album, but it still raised eyebrows with "Jesus Loves Me", a
        seemingly heartfelt but inescapably patronizing burlesque of negro
        spirituals that repeatedly used an even more taboo word than "negro."
        How were we to take this coming from two white women, wedged in amid all
        those demented operatic stylings and feline French chansons? Were they
        sincerely culturally tone-deaf or were we being provoked, and if so, to
        feel what precisely? "I like CocoRosieà" you might say, on a pre-emptive
        defensive.

        Things only got murkier over three more albums, as the Casadys expanded
        their junk drawer of guitar, piano, harp, toys, and percussion with
        electronics, bass, keyboards, and beatboxing. They had a phase of
        styling their faces like Guy Fawkes masks; a phase of wearing Sean John
        velour and cornrows. Noah's Ark featured unicorn sodomy on its cover,
        lyrics about turning aborted babies into Bambies, and criticism
        inoculations via Antony Hegarty and Devendra Banhart features. On The
        Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, nursery rhymes crept toward
        raps, and CocoRosie's scab-picking at African-American otherness started
        to feel more like a particular fixation than just exotica among exotica.
        The record included some of the band's most flagrantly off-putting music
        ("Japan", incompatible with any conceivable taste) and some of its most
        deceptively ingratiating. "Rainbowarriors" was an electro-pop earworm
        where preposterously vapid lyrics masked a subtler angle on CocoRosie's
        more obvious race-baiting: They were based on Longfellow's Native
        American fantasia "The Song of Hiawatha", a sacred text of fraught
        cross-cultural appropriation.

        Following Grey Oceans, their meekest and least memorable album (except
        for its impressively unappealing cover), CocoRosie wipe the slate clean
        on Tales of a Grass Widow. With two Antony spots and sleek Valgeir
        Sigur≡sson production, it returns to the more extroverted styles of
        Noah's Ark and Ghosthorse. But while those albums were full of tangents,
        Grass Widow highlights CocoRosie's most practical songwriting, with
        vocals that are often refreshingly natural and fluent. First single
        "Gravediggress", while thin for its length, gives an accurate impression
        of the rest of the record: The juiced-up piano and synth bounce of
        "After the Afterlife" leads without a hitch into "Tears for Animals", a
        sweeping duet with Antony, who sings sweetly about love for humankind.
        Beyond electronic pop, there are restorations of CocoRosie's folksy
        side; the cracked brightness of "Roots of My Hair" recalls faded Joanna
        Newsom comparisons. The cobwebs that overgrew Grey Oceans are swept back
        to corners such as "Broken Chariot", a quite reasonable four minutes of
        velvety Mesoamerican flutes.

        It's all remarkably pleasant for a CocoRosie album-- you leave it not
        with the feeling of having weathered an intriguing, baffling ordeal, but
        of having listened to something recognizable as an album. There are
        half-hearted jabs at provocation, with perspectives of endangered
        children linking songs such as "Child Bride" ("Whose little girl am I? /
        The man with the black hat will take me home tonight") and "Harmless
        Monster", but it's all more soapy and sentimental than disturbing. Nor
        is there anything very loaded now about the generically misanthropic
        singsong raps over the lush whistles and tuned percussion of "End of
        Time". It feels like a long-held transgressive impulse spending its last
        momentum, beneficially redirecting energy into more direct emotional
        appeals.

        It's hard to fathom that Grass Widow is the work of a band that has
        inspired so many sour fights, think-pieces, and passionate apologias
        from prominent musicians. The question of whether CocoRosie were cynical
        shock-jocks or fearless artists proved permanently unanswerable to
        everyone, probably including the Casadys themselves. It was always too
        simple to say they were just charlatans, but it was also too simple to
        protest they were not. The point was that your position said something
        about who you were and what you believed in. But it's mooted on this
        open-hearted, revitalizing album, the boldest gesture left to a band
        that had been so determined to repulse. Grass Widow makes it easier to
        say, "I like CocoRosie," period.

        --6.7/10 Pitchfork

                                Tracklisting

     01. After The Afterlife                                            3:03
     02. Tears For Animals                                              5:18
     03. Child Bride                                                    4:18
     04. Broken Chariot                                                 2:15
     05. End Of Time                                                    3:20
     06. Harmless Monster                                               3:07
     07. Gravediggress                                                  5:26
     08. Far Away                                                       4:36
     09. Roots Of My Hair                                               5:58
     10. Villain                                                        4:19
     11. Poison                                                        18:17

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               CocoRosie - Tales Of A Grass Widow

        Label.........................: CocoRosie
        Genre.........................: Indie
        StoreDate.....................: May-28-2013
        Source........................: CDDA
        Grabber.......................: Exact Audio Copy (Secure Mode)
        Encoding Scheme...............: Lame 3.98.4 V0 VBR Joint-Stereo
        Size..........................: 95.22 MB
        Total Playing Time............: 59:57

        Release Notes:

        CocoRosie have impressive staying power for a band that has frequently
        incorporated repellence into its style, tempering their perversity with
        enough weird beauty to keep us on the hook. On 2004 debut La maison de
        mon rêve, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady meowed warped endearments
        over freak folk guitars and hip-hop beats. It's their sparest and
        loveliest album, but it still raised eyebrows with "Jesus Loves Me", a
        seemingly heartfelt but inescapably patronizing burlesque of negro
        spirituals that repeatedly used an even more taboo word than "negro."
        How were we to take this coming from two white women, wedged in amid all
        those demented operatic stylings and feline French chansons? Were they
        sincerely culturally tone-deaf or were we being provoked, and if so, to
        feel what precisely? "I like CocoRosie…" you might say, on a pre-emptive
        defensive.

        Things only got murkier over three more albums, as the Casadys expanded
        their junk drawer of guitar, piano, harp, toys, and percussion with
        electronics, bass, keyboards, and beatboxing. They had a phase of
        styling their faces like Guy Fawkes masks; a phase of wearing Sean John
        velour and cornrows. Noah's Ark featured unicorn sodomy on its cover,
        lyrics about turning aborted babies into Bambies, and criticism
        inoculations via Antony Hegarty and Devendra Banhart features. On The
        Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, nursery rhymes crept toward
        raps, and CocoRosie's scab-picking at African-American otherness started
        to feel more like a particular fixation than just exotica among exotica.
        The record included some of the band's most flagrantly off-putting music
        ("Japan", incompatible with any conceivable taste) and some of its most
        deceptively ingratiating. "Rainbowarriors" was an electro-pop earworm
        where preposterously vapid lyrics masked a subtler angle on CocoRosie's
        more obvious race-baiting: They were based on Longfellow's Native
        American fantasia "The Song of Hiawatha", a sacred text of fraught
        cross-cultural appropriation.

        Following Grey Oceans, their meekest and least memorable album (except
        for its impressively unappealing cover), CocoRosie wipe the slate clean
        on Tales of a Grass Widow. With two Antony spots and sleek Valgeir
        Sigurðsson production, it returns to the more extroverted styles of
        Noah's Ark and Ghosthorse. But while those albums were full of tangents,
        Grass Widow highlights CocoRosie's most practical songwriting, with
        vocals that are often refreshingly natural and fluent. First single
        "Gravediggress", while thin for its length, gives an accurate impression
        of the rest of the record: The juiced-up piano and synth bounce of
        "After the Afterlife" leads without a hitch into "Tears for Animals", a
        sweeping duet with Antony, who sings sweetly about love for humankind.
        Beyond electronic pop, there are restorations of CocoRosie's folksy
        side; the cracked brightness of "Roots of My Hair" recalls faded Joanna
        Newsom comparisons. The cobwebs that overgrew Grey Oceans are swept back
        to corners such as "Broken Chariot", a quite reasonable four minutes of
        velvety Mesoamerican flutes.

        It's all remarkably pleasant for a CocoRosie album-- you leave it not
        with the feeling of having weathered an intriguing, baffling ordeal, but
        of having listened to something recognizable as an album. There are
        half-hearted jabs at provocation, with perspectives of endangered
        children linking songs such as "Child Bride" ("Whose little girl am I? /
        The man with the black hat will take me home tonight") and "Harmless
        Monster", but it's all more soapy and sentimental than disturbing. Nor
        is there anything very loaded now about the generically misanthropic
        singsong raps over the lush whistles and tuned percussion of "End of
        Time". It feels like a long-held transgressive impulse spending its last
        momentum, beneficially redirecting energy into more direct emotional
        appeals.

        It's hard to fathom that Grass Widow is the work of a band that has
        inspired so many sour fights, think-pieces, and passionate apologias
        from prominent musicians. The question of whether CocoRosie were cynical
        shock-jocks or fearless artists proved permanently unanswerable to
        everyone, probably including the Casadys themselves. It was always too
        simple to say they were just charlatans, but it was also too simple to
        protest they were not. The point was that your position said something
        about who you were and what you believed in. But it's mooted on this
        open-hearted, revitalizing album, the boldest gesture left to a band
        that had been so determined to repulse. Grass Widow makes it easier to
        say, "I like CocoRosie," period.

        --6.7/10 Pitchfork

                                Tracklisting

     01. After The Afterlife                                            3:03
     02. Tears For Animals                                              5:18
     03. Child Bride                                                    4:18
     04. Broken Chariot                                                 2:15
     05. End Of Time                                                    3:20
     06. Harmless Monster                                               3:07
     07. Gravediggress                                                  5:26
     08. Far Away                                                       4:36
     09. Roots Of My Hair                                               5:58
     10. Villain                                                        4:19
     11. Poison                                                        18:17

                     Support The Artists, Buy Their Music....



This NFO File was rendered by NFOmation.net