On last year's La Maison de Mon Reve, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady dreamt freely from a Parisian purview, traipsing idly from Haiti to St. Nicholas Ave. The lyrics were wildly surrealistic but obviously the product of minds blissfully unfettered, and the content was clearly informed by exotic experience.
So dock no points for bourgeois enmity unless you're willing to do the same to all bands that make insular music, even when you approve of one's particular insular lifestyle. Instead, save the scythe for the kitschy styling, indolent performances, and hokey gags. That, and Noah's Ark is one of the most annoying records you're liable to remember. Freak-folk can be transparent, but it's also radiant with melody. Here we remove the rouge only to find dust, emaciated skeletons of songs that sound not so much played as exorcised.
At least the gimmicky La Maison meant well. The itinerant duo was lost in a meditative ether, but the album stayed anchored to a place, somewhere around the 18th Arrondissement, Paris. Never been? Didn't matter. Chez Coco was candlelit and stocked with Strega and strange pills. Half-eaten acoustic strum streamed from porous hip-hop beats, achieving contradiction: dense flavor that washed down like air. "Good Friday" was a whisper of haunting beauty, the sibs retching their off-tune harmony just perfectly.
Not even help from luminaries Antony and Devendra prevents Noah's Ark from coming totally unmoored. CR has abandoned its misguided love affair with delta blues, strapped on moon boots, and left Earth's orbit. The new vibe is extraterrestrial. "The Sea Is Calm" pits detuned player piano against disembodied voices and filthy bong bubbles. There's Banhart on the surprisingly percussive "Brazilian Sun", his voice garbled like almost every other sound on the record. "Tekno Love Song," with its crushingly beautiful lullaby and yearning vox, comes closest to some recognizable humanity. But the gist is pretty gruesome, all hearse-drawn laments seething dyspeptic fumes, wormholed in from someplace terrifying.
The lyrics don't get us anywhere, either. On "K-Hole" the Casadys graduate to the hard shit. Cool, but how's the comedown? "Tiny spirit in a k-hole/ Bloated like soggy cereal/ God will come and wash away/Our tattoos and all the cocaine/ And all of the aborted babies/Will turn into bambies." Inversely, no friggin' clue what I was supposed to have taken to enjoy this ride, but reentry was the best part.
