The Hazy Milk Of Twilight

CocoRosie “The Moon Asked The Crow”

CocoRosie’s music has always been slippery and strange, typically resulting in uncomfortable collisions of jarring, deeply uncool affectations. Their latest album Grey Oceans is their best work to date, mostly because they have a better handle on how to make their juxtapositions resonate on a level deeper than willfully grotesque critic-baiting. There’s an intense sadness at the core of Grey Oceans, but it’s often rendered inexplicable and incomprehensible by the duo’s oddness and absurdity. The melancholy mainly comes through in the piano, but you can sense it in their voices — most obviously in the sister with the jazzy voices, less blatantly but more poignantly in the one who sounds like some sort of gremlin. “The Moon Asked The Crow” is a showcase for the latter sister, who raps her way through it like a distaff Tricky. Her words are nothing but mystical nonsense and the music is like mid-’90s R&B shot through the prism of fantasy fiction, but somehow I find this very moving. I like that this record makes me question what I’m feeling and wonder why these particular aesthetics and inflections trigger particular feelings. I’m not sure exactly where these women are coming from, but I suspect on some level they want us to think about emotion and sentimentality as being at least somewhat arbitrary.

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