CocoRosie at Variety Playhouse (Atlanta, 9/21/10)

Part Anthropologie catalogue, part Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a dash of Puccini and a splash of Charlie Chaplin. Throw in some CrazySexyCool-era TLC for good measure and you might have some idea of what a CocoRosie concert feels like.

Yeah, they're pretty easy to hate upon for their whole prodigal émigré shtick, but on Tuesday at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, CocoRosie was totally captivating, providing a full-sensory experience of shifting sounds and enchanting visuals that truly blew me away.

In the center of the stage sat an old wooden crib with a slightly sinister-looking baby painted on the side, innovatively converted into a drum kit and flanked by a grand piano, a bright blue harp, a lopsided keyboard, and a table covered in a clutter of battery-operated children’s toys that would later be used as instruments. The place looked more like a pimped-out nursery than a music stage, and Bianca "Coco" and Sierra "Rosie" Casady matched their surroundings well, dressed up like little girls who just raided a fashionable mother’s decade-spanning closet.

Live, the freak-folky sister act succeeds where their recordings fall short, managing to draw listeners fully into the strange, carefully crafted little world they so clearly live in. Heady, uncanny, and slightly cloying, this place is a cosseted fantasy land of lovingly crayoned rainbows and expensive vials of Parisian patchouli. There are plenty of vintage costumes to try on. Come on in.

There’s something a little Flowers in the Attic about the whole affair, but from the floor of the Variety—where throngs of decked out, boozed up cult fans screeched their praises and even, in rare moments of composure, tossed flowers—CocoRosie seemed nothing short of fabulous. As did the truly fantastic beatboxing of lovable Vanilla Ice doppelganger Tez, who wore sweet flip-up sunglasses and possessed some serious skillz on the mic. His 10-minute solo during an intermission was one of the coolest parts of the whole show. 

Also worth mentioning, the stupid fake mustaches that Coco and Rosie have been shoving down our throats lately (gender-bending sensibility: thoroughly noted) were, happily, nowhere to be seen.

The Casady sisters have certainly retained the bond they nurtured back in Paris while recording their first album together, the appropriately titled La Maison de Mon Rêve (The House of My Dreams). Their most recent album, 2010’s Grey Oceans, has a similarly enchanting feel to it. Sierra’s classically-trained soprano bubbles up against Bianca’s grating warble, which kind of sounds like the voice of Danny Torrance’s finger in The Shining (“Red rum, red rum, red ruuummm…” You remember).

In Grey Oceans, the sisters toy with a widened range of influences, all spliced up and pasted together, with results ranging from the intricate beauty of medieval mosaics to the tawdry, gluey messes of overwrought decoupage.

The concert showcased this bold blending at its best. The lovely Judy Garland-esque chorus sandwiched between the mournful vocals, slow-jam percussion, and delicious brass accents of “Lemonade.” The lindy hop patty-cake cameo of “Hopscotch.” The gorgeously danceable “Fairy Paradise,” where smiling Sierra’s haunting coloratura sidles alongside a particularly delightful stretch of stoic Bianca-style lyricism in which “trance music makes the fairies dance.”

CocoRosie is what Tegan & Sara might become if they went to Devendra Banhart’s house, took a whole bunch of acid, and started believing in fairies. “Welcome to New Weird America,” the fairies would say. “You’ll like it here.”

Review & Photos by Hilary Cadigan

Crystal Castles at Masquerade (Atlanta, 9/8/10)

In May, indie-electro duo Alice Glass and Ethan Kath, aka Crystal Castles, released their second LP. It was named, in a typical show of studied apathy, Crystal Castles (II).

I loved it less that Crystal Castles (I), but not very much less. Ultimately, the album proved, like most successful sophomore efforts, unafraid to grow away from the greatness of its predecessor, with that natural ease toward tranquility that tends to come with age. Here, while the happy mix of distortions and syncopations remain, the jagged Atari sounds of their earlier material give way to a new kind of intricate yet hypnotic layering. See: "I Am Made of Chalk," which closes out the album by distilling all the noise into a strange and haunting lullaby of electronic cooing noises reminiscent of baby animals communing with mom animals on Planet Earth. Which is nice.

But, as suggested by the above photograph, at a Crystal Castles concert we do not have these moments of stillness—not once, from opener “Fainting Spells” to second encore “Yes No,” a B-side followed by Glass stalking off stage, as she always does. Don't worry, Alice hasn't grown up. Or if she has, she's not letting on. There was, in fact, a notable sameness between this and pre-2010 shows—they actually played more old stuff than new, but it didn't feel stale.

There's something boldly satisfying in the way CC forces us to work through their electric blankets of curdled noise to get inside the delicious beats underneath. The flailing limbs flailed on through “Courtship Dating” and the spastic shrieks of “Insectica” (featuring a rare moment in which Ethan stepped out from behind his turntable to rock out on the guitar), before accelerating into the double-time, double- spastic wilderness of “Doe Deer,” the ironically-titled sonic translation of a rabid monkey gang-bang.

And while I remain decidedly un-thrilled by the synthy, syrupy futurepop of inexplicable single “Celestica,” it did function better live—providing slight reprieve from the pounding without breaking anyone’s momentum. But "Celestica" pales in comparison to a song like “Baptism” (which I'd like to label the shoulda-been single of Crystal Castles [II]), when the itchy noise blanket is suddenly stripped away to reveal a deliciously clean and catchy techno beat that feels at once classic, rare, and totally rewarding. This, my friends, is something to shake your shit to.

The middle of the show was one big delicious soup of popular favorites from 2008, including “Crimewave,” “Untrust Us,” and of course, “Alice Practice, ” proving perhaps that ultimately, for all their ‘tude and grandeur, Crystal Castles is here to give us exactly what we want. Ethan stoically pumps out the jams in his hoodie while Alice, with kohl-rimmed cat eyes and an entirely black ensemble, shrieks and thrashes amidst an epileptic wash of strobe lights, repeatedly stage-diving into the sweaty sea of limbs below.

As the tired-looking security guards snatched up less-famous crowd-surfers washing up from the aforementioned sea, we on the floor bounced in unison until those achy old floorboards felt like they'd cave in. We watched transfixed as Alice danced atop the drum set and slugged down what I’m pretty sure was a bottle of whiskey onstage. And it’s not like we didn’t know she’d do these things, but we really do love the way she does them. Yeah, she can be a bit of a turd sometimes—from snubbing Texans to pirating blog art to punching Spanish security guards in the face—but for some reason the lady remains, in my eyes, utterly forgivable and totally bad-ass. 

Maybe it’s because she’s Canadian.

Review and Photos by Hilary Cadigan