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Rating:
“If every angel’s terrible, then / why do you welcome them?”
Here's how it went: I had seen them in Verona three days earlier and I already knew that the Casady sisters possess a certain peculiar charm; then, enchanted by their magical formula (melodies with an ancient flavor based on toy sounds) and the brief chat exchanged with Sierra, I couldn't resist: I followed them to Turin.
Now, you'll have to trust me blindly (and I apologize) to believe in this 5/5; but know this: my perception, already not very clear from the start, became increasingly dreamlike as that jewel of a show went on.
On stage, CocoRosie are "teleporting witches," as Devendra Banhart, the prodigy boy of this American "pre-war folk" scene, called them.
Bianca (who is then his girlfriend) is made up as a circus director with those strange drawn-on mustaches on her face; she presses the buttons of her toys with an almost autistic manner, and out come animal sounds, drumbeats, sirens, voices, and bizarre clatters. Sierra, next to her, with a black clown tear painted under her right eye, plays the guitar or sometimes the keyboard, as she does now in Lyla, their most moving piece.
Magic and transportation, yes... and enchantment, I might add: if I didn’t see them playing and singing in front of me, I would think of a magical music box, with two figures in fine porcelain on top.
I realize that live their voices are much more easily distinguishable than on the record: the classical training of beautiful (purely beautiful, indeed enchanting) Sierra emerges, yet the dominant one is Bianca's voice, wonderfully shrill, a loud meowing, a schizophrenic gasp.
Sierra often plucks the strings of a harp, and the atmosphere becomes increasingly fairy-tale-like, as in Not For Sale, which closes the concert-spell.
The audience filling the Café Procope wants more, and so do I; but I console myself because Sierra, just off the stage, comes towards me. The spell of that terrible angel, sweet and unsettling like her black tear, continues; but I keep it to myself.
“…won’t you give me a kiss? / One of your soft sweet lagrimas…”
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