Customer Reviews

La Maison De Mon Reve

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Their voices tone and phrasing may remind you of Joanna Newson or Devendra Banhart, respectively. At times innocent as children yet weathered as the voices in old folk Appalachian songs.
This album is beautiful but not necessarily easy to love specially if the people mentioned above are not particular tastes of yours.
You might have heard the story already so I'll keep it short. Two sisters estranged as children, one street musician, the other one studying Opera in Paris, finally reunite. This album is the product of their growing friendship, just as unpredictable and perfect and unassumingly touching.
To mention songs -possible, each may be your pearl- would be to betray the continuous spell the album offers. Although the songs are not meant to compose a suite, this album is a collection of sorts. Perhaps, you may imagine a childhood scrapbook made of songs.
The experience is rewarding, likely to get you a little tender, under a spell. All good things.

La Maison De Mon R?ve is essentially a tale of two sisters' dreams and fantasies: CocoRosie are Sierra and Bianca Casady, two Brooklyn siblings - the former a student of classical opera in Rome and Paris, the latter a wild child who started singing a cappella on street corners and bars - who rediscover one another in Paris, city of dreams. They hole themselves up in a small apartment in the 18?me arrondissement in the spring of 2003 and eventually surface with this music box of sleepy-eyed, light-as-air melodies.

This is an album that compels you to make 'if' conjectures: if Le Fabuleux Destin d'Am?lie Poulain had been an album, it would have sounded like this; if Bj?rk ever picked up an acoustic guitar and lived in a van in Alaska like Jewel, this would have been the result.

The first song, Terrible Angels, sums up the mood perfectly as the ambient noises of the sisters' Paris flat and recorded barnyard animal noises add idiosyncrasy to the questioning, childlike vocal duet: "If every angel's terrible, then why do you welcome them?" The wistful, helium-pitched gospel stylings of By Your Side add a faded linoleum tinge, as Sierra warbles "I'd wear your black eyes, bake you apple pies...I just wanted to be your housewife", while listening to the unpolished, organic '70s style acoustic guitar melody of Good Friday is like eavesdropping on the two sisters as they tinker away quietly in their white-shuttered flat. The tinny sounds of Tahiti Rain Song evoke ethnic music heard through a scratchy, broken-down transistor radio while sitting in a thatched hut in a steamy jungle.

Their record company labels them "tiny field mice singing gospel" and, for once, the hype is spot on.

Recorded by two sisters in springtime Paris, "Le Maison De Mon Reve" is at once one of the most challenging and beautiful records you'll ever hear. It shows the power of the things that connect us, since these sisters had been estranged since they were young girls (they credited this to two incredibly strong personalities). They both happened to be musicians, one a classically trained opera singer, the other a street corner folk musician, two sides of the same coin after all. When they reunited they found unique things to muse over, and recorded a brilliant album using a lot of the things most people take for granted (like rain for example). They took what seemed like a simple 4-track, an inexpensive microphone, and a whole lot of creative intuition and turned it into one stunning song after the other, like carpenters fashion simple blocks of wood. Upon taking in the completely molded "Le Maison De Mon Reve", it has the same otherworldly feel musically as any Cocteau Twins album, but it manages an intimacy that is indigenous to it and it's immediate surroundings. This is because they turned the limitation of their recording style into an asset, and it became an instrument as well. The warm hissing of tape is just as essential here as the strumming of their guitar, or the clever hip-hop samples they employed, and it says a sunny spring day after rain better than anything they could have used. It's rare that something comes along so different, that you have no immediate reference point to refer it to. CocoRosie and "Le Maison De Mon Reve" are one of those rare things.

I'm writing in response to another reviewer, bliss full Hegre Fan: if you don't like the album, that's fine, but don't say they can't sing...they hit every note perfectly, obviously you just dislike the timbre of their voices.
As for being offended by the "n-word" in "Jesus Loves Me" I'm not sure if you are offended on behalf of Christianity or black people or both. I think it's pretty obvious that they're using the word with an enormous amount of irony, that they're mocking the kind of people who extoll the virtues of the bible but still indulge Jim Crow style prejudices. To say that they are attacking either Jesus or African-americans is just ludicrous.
On a positive note, "By My Side" is perhaps one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

I first heard this album 7 days ago; since then, I have been floating in a Cocorosie cloud. If I could get By Your Side, Terrible Angels, and most particulary, Butterscotch, out of my head, I could focus more.

As it is, these songs are at first strange and entrancing, then you just sink into the beauty and mood of this album. Musically, it's like big soft sofa to me.

And obviously, these melodies are hard to erase from the jukebox in my head. Just gorgeous, can't wait to hear what these two do next.

I first heard these girls when they opened for Bright Eyes. I was dragged to the Bright Eyes show by a friend who had aspare ticket. I really was not looking forward to it... Until CoCo Rosie took the stage. 2 women, one with Keyboards, one with a collection of childrens noise makers and toys. Honestly the cake was taken by their "Percussion section" some black dude in a loud ugly Bill Cosby sweater and a Giagantic Native American Headress playing the human beat box. SPECTACULAR! Most original thing I have ever heard outside of Central park street performers.

This Album is very cohesive, all the nuances of sound blend together to create a cacphony in your mind. If you only hear this album you WILL HATE IT. You must LISTEN to it!

This is extremely unfair. I've been enthusing about how Devendra Banhart is original and groundbreaking and what happens? A French female version of sorts crops up and is more experimental and (shhhhh!) slightly better. This duo follows the grand tradition of off-kilter bedroom folk that is cropping up. Other contenders to this title other than Banhart are: Iron and Wine, Sufjan Stevens and Regina Spektor.
But CocoRosie are way ahead of the pack. This is mainly because they aren't afraid to experiment with different sounds - crickets are sampled, vocals are buggered around with on every track and I'm sure that is a tin can on `Good Friday'. Yet, despite the clutter which dominates the album there is a sense of sparseness. In fact these little sound effects just merely decorate the songs, but are not superfluous. CocoRosie are literally a bundle of oxymorons and every time I try to describe their music I have to contradict myself within the same sentence. So it's better to let the music speak for itself. On a final note (probably a warbled one): it is going to be interesting to see how this `bedroom folk' phenomenon is going to develop, for I'm sure someone is going to push it further.

"I'll iron your clothes / I'll shine your shoes / I'll make your bed / And cook your food / I'll never cheat / I'll be the best girl you'd ever meet / And for a diamond ring / I'll do these kinds of things / I'll scrub your floors / Never be a bore / I'd tuck you in / I do not snore." - Sierra Casady

If you believe in the idea that big things come in small packages, La Maison de Mon Rêve is the type of album you'll want to hear. It comes in the form of a duo called Cocorosie. What makes the album immediately charming is the restrained humility that surrounds each of these songs. From the extremely gentle, yet very old-fashioned, vocals of Sierra Casady to the sparse organic sounds performed by her sister Bianca, La Maison de Mon Rêve is expressive art in its most basic form. Although it's blatantly obvious that the easiest reference here would be Devendra Banhart and his ghostly style, there are additional layers in Cocorosie's music that make it just as promising as anything Mr. Banhart has currently completed. This is primarily due to the fact that there are more instruments and textures in Cocorosie's work.

One of the most influential things about Cocorosie is the fact that they've actually (re)invented a genre consisting of folk, hip-hop, and blues that has never been pursued prior to today. What that genre will be called remains to be seen, but I'd call this album a dense study in "delta folk-blues." Funny enough, because if you research back to the beginning of blues music, you'll find that there aren't too many (if any) female artists from the 30s, 40s, or 50s that played the same type of music as a Robert Johnson or Skip James. Fifty years later, however, Cocorosie actually possess these qualities that were missed by the female artists of those periods.

Not all of La Maison de Mon Rêve is folk and blues based. In fact, on songs like "By Your Side," "Not For Sale," and "Hatian Love Songs," there are tiny hip-hop beats that give the album yet another unlikely dimension. The single greatest element of this album is the vocals given up by Sierra. Her vocals and songwriting abilities are passive, yet entirely effective ("Jesus Loves Me" and "By Your Side"). These are the types of songs I've never heard before; at least in this context. The lyrics themselves are worth their weight in gold; but the entire album is a forward-thinking piece of music.

Only on rare occasions do artists come along and create something completely detached from the rest of the field. They immediately become a trendsetter, and inadvertently inspire many other artists to attempt the same sound. This Parisian duo is one of those artists. I can almost guarantee you haven't heard anything like it in the past, but we'll probably see a lot of imitators in the future. I get extremely excited when things like this come along and remind me that big things do come in small packages. And for the time being, La Maison de Mon Rêve remains the most original sounding album I've heard this year.

When I was younger and hadn't heard as much music I used to quite often get this feeling of wonderful confusion and a kind of dizziness when I heard NEW music. I used to think "what is this? I've never heard anything like this before but I think I like it". That feeling has become a rarer and rarer result from things I've heard over recent years but it happened with this album.
There are gospel influences here but in a similar way to it has touched Daniel Johnston's music. The lyrics are almost as beautiful and bewidering as the twinkling, rattling, beeping and buzzing music. Highlights include By Your Side, Tahiti Rain Song and West Side. The is a trully odd delightful thing of rare beauty and something to be both championed and cherished.

I saw Cocorosie open for TV on the Radio. It was a unique night of vocals. Vocals that rarely see the light of day (or night) in indie rock clubs.
Minimal percussion (minimal instrumentation in general) which gives the record a nice blues feel.