If a live musical experience can ever evoke the spirit of a particular joke, then a CocoRosie gig is that experience and "The Aristocrats"is the joke.
Points of comparison: the joke is based around a "family act" going to see a talent agent.
CocoRosie are two sisters, Sierra and Bianca Casady, who garnered their name from the nicknames "Coco" and "Rosie", given to them by their mother.
The content of the joke is a description of the family's, shall we say, unconventional sexual activities, which struts way beyond the boundaries of accepted taste and joke-telling. CocoRosie push the electro and folk envelopes so far that they end up with an amalgam of sounds that seems to uncontrollably veer between the rehearsed and the off-the-cuff, the beautiful and the chaotic, carving its own niche in the musical map.
The joke involves a cast of extended family coming on and off the stage. CocoRosie's on-stage coterie varies in number between two and eight, utilising a vast number of instruments, as well as children's toys and a videowall showing images of the CocoRosie girls in geisha masks.
As is evident from the above, both "The Aristocrats" and CocoRosie are an acquired taste, and while CocoRosie are unlikely to cause as much offence as the extremely filthy joke, if you like your pop music regular you'll probably want to steer yourself away from them.
Put simply, this is Beth Orton fed through a blender, the instruments and vocals slipping out of sync, topped with slices of beat-boxing, rapping and opera (Sierra studied opera at the Paris Conservatoire), and eaten cold.
Surprisingly for a group whose recordings reek of melancholy and sedation, the cast of eight (one of whom looked like a grown-up Oliver Twist still wearing his childhood clothes and who towards the end of the show began hammering the back of his violin with his bow) perform like a manic Gypsy band: dancing with one another, swapping instruments, lying on the floor and jumping into one another's arms triumphantly at the end.
Re-workings, rather than renditions, of various songs from the La Maison de Mon Reve and Noah's Ark albums, as well as a few slightly more upbeat new tracks and four lines of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", are rolled out. Most notably the elegiac "Good Friday" is transformed into a 10- minute hip-hop jam, while "Beautiful Boyz" (which features Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons on the album version) is developed through a series of rolling arias into a truly dramatic crescendo.
What CocoRosie are, I don't really know, but they have a visceral attraction that is quite irresistible. As the talent agent says at the end of "The Aristocrats", they're "one hell of an act".
Points of comparison: the joke is based around a "family act" going to see a talent agent.
CocoRosie are two sisters, Sierra and Bianca Casady, who garnered their name from the nicknames "Coco" and "Rosie", given to them by their mother.
The content of the joke is a description of the family's, shall we say, unconventional sexual activities, which struts way beyond the boundaries of accepted taste and joke-telling. CocoRosie push the electro and folk envelopes so far that they end up with an amalgam of sounds that seems to uncontrollably veer between the rehearsed and the off-the-cuff, the beautiful and the chaotic, carving its own niche in the musical map.
The joke involves a cast of extended family coming on and off the stage. CocoRosie's on-stage coterie varies in number between two and eight, utilising a vast number of instruments, as well as children's toys and a videowall showing images of the CocoRosie girls in geisha masks.
As is evident from the above, both "The Aristocrats" and CocoRosie are an acquired taste, and while CocoRosie are unlikely to cause as much offence as the extremely filthy joke, if you like your pop music regular you'll probably want to steer yourself away from them.
Put simply, this is Beth Orton fed through a blender, the instruments and vocals slipping out of sync, topped with slices of beat-boxing, rapping and opera (Sierra studied opera at the Paris Conservatoire), and eaten cold.
Surprisingly for a group whose recordings reek of melancholy and sedation, the cast of eight (one of whom looked like a grown-up Oliver Twist still wearing his childhood clothes and who towards the end of the show began hammering the back of his violin with his bow) perform like a manic Gypsy band: dancing with one another, swapping instruments, lying on the floor and jumping into one another's arms triumphantly at the end.
Re-workings, rather than renditions, of various songs from the La Maison de Mon Reve and Noah's Ark albums, as well as a few slightly more upbeat new tracks and four lines of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", are rolled out. Most notably the elegiac "Good Friday" is transformed into a 10- minute hip-hop jam, while "Beautiful Boyz" (which features Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons on the album version) is developed through a series of rolling arias into a truly dramatic crescendo.
What CocoRosie are, I don't really know, but they have a visceral attraction that is quite irresistible. As the talent agent says at the end of "The Aristocrats", they're "one hell of an act".
