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The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn

by

CocoRosie

 
The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
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Avg: 4.0 (290 ratings)

An album that will either leave you shaking or gazing dreamily out a window. Or both.

  • We Say...

    Sisters Bianca and Sierra Cassidy have built an entire discography on the principles of assemblage: CoCoRosie routinely paste together disparate bits of sound, teasing out melodies and stories, cranking out freak-folk tinged with hip-hop, trance and something candlelit and altogether unfamiliar.

    On The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, CoCoRosie’s third full-length, horses toss back their manes and neigh, children’s toys burp and squeak, found-sound samples spin and warp, drum machines sputter, bells chime, keyboards moan. Bianca chant-raps, Sierra bays with operatic aplomb and the resulting cacophony feels a little like stumbling through a flea market in some far-flung European hamlet, knocking into unfamiliar gadgets, clawing through bins of used silverware, spotting priceless baroque artifacts and chipped Coca-Cola glasses on the same crappy folding table, disoriented by all the mingling and the smell of someone cooking onions. The Cassidys thrive on twisting simple keyboard melodies into big, atmospheric productions that are pretty and nightmarish at the same time, and The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn will either leave you shaking or gazing dreamily out a window. Or both.

  • They Say...

    It would be very easy for CocoRosie to make merely ornamental music and focus only on the pretty, ethereal sound that was so charming on La Maison de Mon Rêve. Fortunately, Sierra and Bianca Casady have more ambition than that, and they've managed to craft very different identities for each of their albums -- no small feat, especially since their approach is so distinctive. On The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, they combine the cleanest, most polished-sounding production to appear on a CocoRosie album with a stark hip-hop influence, making this the duo's most focused, and strangest, album yet. The sisters explore this polarity throughout The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, opening the album with the bold, jaunty beats of "Rainbow Warriors" and following it with the much more delicate trip-hop of "Promise." Switching back and forth between mischievous, endearingly awkward moments and one of breathtaking beauty like day and night, or waking and dreaming, it's almost as if the album posits each of the Casadys' talents as opposing viewpoints. The tracks Bianca takes the lead on are bright and outrageous, like "Japan," which bounces along like the Mad Hatter's tea party as she sings, "Everybody wants to go to Iraq/But once you go there, you don't come back." The song's topsy-turvy feel only deepens when Sierra's eerie background vocals turn into a cheery trumpet melody. Meanwhile, "Black Poppies" and the other songs Sierra dominates delve even deeper into the narcotic chansons of La Maison de Mon Rêve and Noah's Ark. Her singing on The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn is her finest yet, especially on the middle-of-the-day lullaby "Sunshine" and "Miracle," where she has much more power and range than some of her previous kitten-ish Billie Holiday impersonations would suggest. The playful arrangements that are so vital to CocoRosie's sound come into sharper focus on this album, too, with a toy box's worth of sound effects adding poignancy and whimsy to "Animals" and harp and trumpet deepening "Raphael"'s mournful beauty. The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn's densely packed sounds and ideas are a lot to process, but they're what makes this album rewarding on repeated listens -- and what makes CocoRosie's yin-yang, fractured fairy tale sound still surprising three albums into their career.

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