Singers with Unique Voices: CocoRosie (The Unique Voices Club #30)
- Alexia Rowe
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
Every Friday, I write a post about singers with unique voices not commonly heard in mainstream music in an effort to educate emerging artists and music lovers and inspire them to embrace their own quirks. This week I'm writing on CocoRosie.
How on earth I didn't learn about CocoRosie until researching Melanie Martinez for this blog I don't know, since they've been active since 2003 or so. That's the reason this blog exists though. And while this band works in the indie pop, folktronica and hip-hop genres, they also work in two genres coming out of the 60s and 70s: "New Weird America," and "freak folk," both derivatives of psychedelic music. I'd never heard of either one before this exact moment, and apparently Joanna Newsom (probably one of my favorite unique voices so far) was one of the most prominent in that genre (makes sense). You learn something new every day, firebirds. I feel like I'm on an acid trip at a Janis Joplin concert listening to them or perhaps at a meditation retreat in the Himalayas somewhere. And don't tell my mother I said that.
It doesn't surprise me that CocoRosie (made up of sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady) took a couple pages out of the unconventional book seeing as their Native American mother was a nomadic Steiner/Waldorf teacher and their father was an organic farmer and New Age spiritualist. In the epitome of free range hippie parenting, the girls spent their childhood in reservations, peyote circles, pow-wows and on vision quests in the desert. I will also add that because their mother believed the real world would be a better education than a school, neither sister finished high school.
After some years apart, the sisters reconnected in early 2003 in Paris, being to create lo-fi experimental music in an apartment bathroom with distinct vocals and sounds from unorthodox instruments such as toys using one micrphone and a broken pair of headphones. These songs became their debut La Maison de Mon Rêve, which got critical acclaim through the indie label Touch and Go. Eight albums and some twenty-odd years later, the approach has been the same regarding creating the music. An avant-garde hybrid of electronic, classical, lo-fi, opera, instruments from all over the world, and poetry exploring how a child would see the world without judgment and other parts of the human condition.
The Casady sisters' voices are so different but their contrasts are their superpower. Sierra received classical voice training from Rome and Paris, while Bianca has a childlike, vocal-fry, spoken word kind of delivery. As heard on the song "Werewolf,"it's almost like a blend of opera and hip-hop that seems to be a starting point of Hamilton (this song and its album predate the musical). Bianca's voice is likely the first thing you will notice when you first listen to a CocoRosie song. Watching her perform live in one video, you will see that she achieves that sound through barely moving her jaw and add a kind of low tremor to the ends of her notes. While Sierra has an undeniably operatic quality to her voice, she seems to lean away from the traditional training slightly with a Björk-like effect (and sometimes using autotune). And somehow they made it on the r/cringe subReddit, but hey, what are ya gonna do? Authentic art is naturally cringe. It's supposed to be weird.
You will probably never hear CocoRosie's music on the radio, which is why I'm sharing it here this week. But as with the other artists I've written about so far, still go and follow them so that you stay up to date on what they're creating next. And if you're scared to share your own voice or taste because it doesn't quite fit into what society would deem as "normal," then I encourage you to just do it. If people love CocoRosie, someone is going to love your taste.
And that is all for this week on The Unique Voices Club! Don't forget to subscribe or at the very least share this blog to your inner circle so that the revolution of breaking the status quo in art can reach far and wide. And if you subscribe to my Patreon, you get to suggest unique voices to me to cover in the future! Your voice will be acknowledged!
Stay educated,
Alexia
