La Maison De Mon Reve

This is an album that compels you to make 'if' conjectures: if Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain had been an album, it would have sounded like this; if Björk 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.

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.