God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me

You’ve probably noticed that Sierra and Bianca, the sisters who make up CocoRosie, are not the type to play coy when it comes to performing. Not only do their provocatively bright outfits and adventuresome vocals call attention to this fact, but the duo unapologetically evokes the name of the big "man" upstairs in the title of their latest single. And for the record, G-O-D is an S-H-E.

Known to many as folk musicians, the single God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me distances CocoRosie from comparisons to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. With well-timed synths and programmed beats, they have managed to move away from the muted whimsicality of their previous work into an energetically hip-hop inflected sound.

Despite their attempts to prove otherwise, the sisters are far from capricious. Lyrically, CocoRosie fails to add much depth to the ambitiously titled track, and somewhere after the second verse, the looped drumbeats and xylophone notes fall flat. With pop-a-licious drums and operatic vocals, CocoRosie is tapping into a formula that will undoubtedly force hipsters to move their feet to the beat, but a song with such an enthralling title needs to be more than just a whimsical dance number. Sure, God Has a Voice has a catchy hook, but it doesn't graduate beyond that.

I expected these dapper dames to turn the musical world on its head - not merely by pushing a feminist agenda, but through the creation of innovative music. In a world where the term feminism is shunned in popular culture, it is refreshing to find a couple of talented women unafraid to proclaim that God is a woman. However, when you manage to lose the poetry in subversity, are you really speaking out through your art? Or is it all a well-planned marketing ploy?

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