CocoRosie, Heartache City - album review

Download: Forget Me Not; Lucky Clover; No One Knows

Valgeir Sigurosson’s production of 2013’s Tales Of A Grasswidow lent it a cohesion which is sadly absent from Heartache City.

As too, save for the mentions of “shamen women” in “Lost Girls”, is its predecessor’s unifying theme of under-regarded women.

While their gift for striking images endures in lines like “orgies of dust and butterfly laughter” and “if only I could remember you, your face on a tree, your blood inside of me”, their dizzy streams of rustic-mystic consciousness are accompanied by music which tends to imprison it in the nursery.

The childlike aesthetic has limitations, curdling somewhat when confronted with such real-life issues as being “Big & Black” and getting shot for it, “blam-blam-blam”.

But there’s engaging compensation in the hypnotic lilt of “Lucky Clover” and also through the winsome harmonies of “No One Knows”.