Grey Oceans,  PIAS Recordings ***

There's kooky and then there's kooky – and then there's CocoRosie. Larking about under the decidedly apt if often quite flaky "freak folk" umbrella, sisters Bianca ("Coco") and Sierra ("Rosie") Casady have gamely taken on Devendra Banhart, Björk and other left-of-centre musicians. The result is a curious mixture all of their own. With a collective background in opera, linguistics, sociology, "vision quests" on Indian reservations, tattoos and terrible cover art ( Noah's Ark, their second album, featured a drawing by Bianca of three unicorns having sex while one of them throws up), you can safely say the women know how to throw curve balls. Grey Oceansis a melange of deft imagination and cerebral fertility, wrapped up in fragile spiderweb tunes that encompass folk, electronica and, well, CocoRosie daftness. If it wasn't so downright odd it'd get two stars, but for idiosyncratic value alone an extra star is well deserved. See cocorosieland.com

Download tracks:The Moon Asked the Crow, Gallows