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Weird it may be, but when CocoRosie get it right, as with the cutesy pop and dark piano melancholy mix of Lemonade, or the beautiful ethereal balladry of the title track for example, they are unstoppable.
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Full of contradictions, the album is primitive and ultra-modern, dark and enchanting, tranquil and energetic.
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For this blissfully weirdo fourth outing, the sisters Casady freakishly but joyfully plunder the odder bits of medieval folk, drum and bass, Western saloon and Mitteleuropa gothic elements.
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Grey Oceans is CocoRosie's most beautiful and, more importantly, least bloody irritating record to date.
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The sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady plus a few guests (jazz pianist Gael Rakotondrabe, Argentine drummer Bolsa) improvise another trek through their active imaginations, doing whatever makes sense (or not) to them that day.
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This cohesiveness is the very thing that was lacking from previous efforts, and ultimately dulled their impact. Kudos to the Casadys for finally accenting their highly inventive songwriting in a unified manner.
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While they have many good ideas, sometimes they have too many good ideas at once and end up gilding the lily (or putting a blue fake fur mustache on it, as the case may be).
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So after the outré highs and lows of Grey Oceans have played their last syllable, it's hard to know what to think of it, apart from being slightly underwhelmed for the most part.
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http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/cocorosie-grey-oceans
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UncutIt's hard going, but one can only applaud the ambition. [Jun 2010, p.83]
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MojoAnother helping of skew-whiff artiness from teh oddball Casady siblings. [June 2010, p. 99]
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Q MagazineThier fourth album is a step back in the right direction. [Jun 2010, p.120]
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Some will have the patience and tolerance for searching repeatedly through Grey Oceans to uncover moments of thoughtful beauty. But they're a little harder to find than they should be.
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While Grey Oceans is less caustic than their other work, it still has that lay-it-all-on-the-line quality that's worked for Antony Hegarty, Devendra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom. The difference is that the album never feels like anything's at stake, whereas past records embraced experimentation at any cost.
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What saves Grey Oceans is the occasional good idea: the Eastern-tinged Smokey Taboo mixes tablas and wilting strings with Bianca's woozy, half-rapped vocal to impressive effect, while the very peculiar Fairy Paradise is, more or less, Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy as remixed by Paul van Dyk.
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On the whole, Grey Oceans seems to be the same old thing. I wouldn't recommend this to a first time listener of the band.
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It either needs to at least nod to actual humanity or just be off-the-wall insane, but doing neither, it just comes off as fake. Grey Oceans falls in-between the cracks of the extremes, and while still an interesting album, feels too shallow and too Serious.
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No matter your feeling on CocoRosie, whether love them for their innovation or hate them for their grating pretension, when you hear Grey Oceans you might find yourself missing those more challenging (or more inventive) days.
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Undoubtedly containing their best material since their debut, Grey Oceans has the unfortunate inability to get all that material in the same place.
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Occasionally beautiful, often irritating.
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More often, however, CooRosie appear uninterested in the listener's experience--and that can make Grey Oceans a bit of a slog. The cost of their commitment is you.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 22
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Mixed: 2 out of 22
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Negative: 3 out of 22
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jeremyMay 17, 2010People just don't get them.
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Oct 15, 2011
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Sep 4, 2020