CocoRosie - We Are On Fire

Love them or hate them, you really have to hand it to CocoRosie. Few acts seem straddle as many genres as they do to any remotely coherent effect: freak folk/twee pop/electroacoustic/ethereal electronica/chamber music/hip hop – it is pretty remarkable on paper. However, the duo’s output is so divisive, you have to think it means that they’re doing something right. It is making people feel something, which in music world, is better than making people feel nothing at all. CocoRosie really straddle the creative apex of indie music, as it is hard to work out whether they are pretentiously “weird” and self-indulgent or truly avant-garde.

CocoRosie’s new single, ‘We Are On Fire’, doesn’t necessarily make that question any clearer. Like most of their output, the song is a mishmash of some truly inspired ideas and some truly perplexing ones. The song itself, is more polished and structurally straightforward than anything from their debut, La Maison de Mon Rêve. It has a hip-hop bounce, with glassy keyboard flourishes. Their distinctly cracked voices will either annoy or endear depending on your tastes. Then you have a chorus that actually seems a bit flat, but it eventually leads up to a beautiful bridge where ethereal vocals sound like they are soaring over a huge canyon.

It is quite hodge-podge and it meanders towards an unknown destination but you may find yourself revisiting it again and again trying to work out whether you love it or hate it. With that being said if ‘We Are On Fire’ commits any crime, it is that it is not as interesting as they’re truly provocative output (poor girls, they can’t seem to win everyone over at the same time – they’re either “too freaky” or “not interesting enough”).

B-side, ‘Tearz For Animals’ which features frequent collaborator Antony Hegarty is a great cut that fares much better than the title track. The song stutters along an undulating piano riff in a state of suspended tension until they reach the refrain “do you have love for humankind?” – it acts as a beautiful mantra that benefits from the repetition. The voices tremble and crackle in the right places and the song carries a very delicate beauty despite some hard beats underneath. This is an example of a CocoRosie single where the Casady sisters get the balance right. It is a shame that this balance couldn’t be achieved on the lead single.