Thoughts on another album long lost to hipster folk memory which has finally caught my attention...

Coco-Rosie – Noah’s Ark (Touch & Go)

I always get a slightly cynical, hipster-ish vibe off Coco-Rosie that I don’t particularly care for. I’m not sure why. Somehow they always sound cold where they should be warm, nasty whilst they’re pretending to be nice. No, I don’t really know what I mean either, but I’m a strange, hung-up boy, and the atmosphere I want to get out of records can sometimes be worryingly precise.

Well anyway, all that hasn’t stopped me listening to their new (well, it WAS new) album. So, hmm... What do we think? The first track here sounds a bit like Joanna Newsom doing a rap, much in the style of Beck. How can that possibly be a bad thing?? The second song, ‘Beautiful Boys’, is a tribute to Jean Genet sung in collaboration with that Anthony character who won that big prize last year. It’s a really good song, quite aching and poignant and stuff. I recently finished reading ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’ and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I guess my appreciation of the subject matter gives me a way into it. It does sound a bit too much like a song from a surprise hit off-Broadway musical about a dying drag queen, but I guess that’s pretty inevitable under the circumstances.

The rest of the album rather blurs into one and doesn’t really put out any hooks to drag me further into it – see initial paragraph. My main observation is that it’s surprising how quickly all of this semi-genre of popular freaky folky type stuff seems to be merging into an instantly identifiable ‘sound’, despite the initial diversity of its protagonists. Unnecessarily squeaky voices?, plucked stringed instruments that aren’t guitars? Four-Tet style skittering, reversed beats and phased, buzzy textures hovering in the background? A reverence for both whimsical ‘60s folk and Kate Bush / Tori Amos style drama school musical theatricality? – Noah’s Ark has all the relevant boxes ticked.

There’s plenty of other stuff going on too of course, and they’re trying their hardest to forge their own path, and are to be applauded for that. A lot of people who aren’t me (no lesser personage than the great John Darnielle amongst them) will doubtless find a lot of meaning and beauty in this album, and good for them, I’m not criticisin’ nothing. But I still find it interesting that most of the central THINGS on this album are exactly the same central things that have turned up on other albums by the various other people in this loosely defined circle of folky folks.