A palpable, universal sadness permeates the record. In "Werewolf," Bianca talk-sings, "Corny movies make me reminisce/ They break me down easy/ Honest generic love shit/ First kiss/ Frog and princess." The moments that resonate most are these; instances extending fairy tales of the everyday. "Promise" follows a quasi-sacred love story ("our hands hold bonfires burning bright") through "oceans of tears" and a "desert of diamonds" to a "crystal light" housed between the protagonist's thighs. There's dancing and laughing "from dusk to dusk," the central "tarnished offering" of heart/self/etc. It's rapped over an oscillating, click-tongued beat box. (You can link CocoRosie to the Blow as a basically "indie rock" band finding a way to channel hip-hop in a manner that's natural, constructive.) In "Houses," a catchy 6-minute pop song with more layers than an old pine tree, a soul-crushed protagonist is alone, living on the highway, only coming out at night or during solar eclipses: She "wake(s) up half empty only to be filled again with morning," decides it best to "go and live amongst the animals." Tea stains, tobacco, and porno provide a residue, company. Also accompanying her loneliness is a menagerie of vocal samples, animal toys, drum machines, organ, etc.

Throughout, music boxes and bells and children's toys create a strange, moving atmosphere. Winking at their previous album, Noah's Ark, a recurrent Knife-cum- Laurie Anderson octave-dropped voice relays a series of animal tales, including one about a girl who talks with geese—she finds a diamond in a crystal stream, places it in her hair, is transformed into a bird, realizing the other geese were once human, too. Connections like this are everywhere: Lonesome kids, shape-shifting (count the werewolves).

"Miracle"'s stunning, a quiet, ultra-atmospheric, Björkian ballad about meeting a seat belt-wearing, basketball- playing boy. The sound of saliva crackles. The French rapper Spleen adds the ghostly, Antony-like imprints of "a boy" in one channel, over a clipped, shaky, black-and-white-seeming Mobius background. Sierra has a lovely voice (she's the operatic one), but it's always Bianca's distinctly cracked warble that gets me—so great when the two are used in conjunction. If Sierra goes on her own, like the end of "Houses", it's pretty but the operatic moments often feel like an interruption of Bianca's achy lyricism ("I don't mean to close the door, but/for the record my heart is sore/You blew through me like bullet holes/left stains on my sheet and stains on my soul") and poetic playfulness.