CocoRosie

People with really cool grandmas probably wonder what it would be like, through some strange twist of fate or science, to know the younger version of these women. Would we get along? What would we do together? If we collaborated on records, it’d probably sound a lot like this one. And the familial reference isn’t so far off — CocoRosie is Sierra and Bianca Casady; two sisters separated in their youth to pursue vastly different lives, reunited by an impulsive inclination, in Paris. The pair holed themselves up briefly in Sierra’s shoebox apartment and recorded a record that surely reflects the juxtaposition of superficial difference based and fundamental similarity. The sound seems nearly authentically antique; the lowest-fi recording of perplexing, perverted oddity is related through soulful gospel voices, inventive, spontaneous percussion — a balanced mix of crappy hip-hop beats you can still nod to and folky acoustic love ballads. La Maison de Mon Rêve has that enviable and admirable feeling of quality that is the result of inherently strong talent, rather than arrangement or production. And you get the impression that either of these women could be making it big singing grand Nelly Furtado-esque pop songs if they really wanted to, but they ooze a little integrity and stick to creating for creativity’s sake.