I once saw a T-shirt slogan which read - 'Don't grow up - it's a trap'.
I feel sure that Bianca ('Coco') and Sierra ('Rosie') Casady who take their stage name from childhood nicknames, would happily endorse this warning.
Proof of the sisters' s resistance to the 'sensible' values of adulthood can be seen in a 2006 documentary directed by Dutch filmmaker David Kleijwegt entitled The Eternal Children.
This film, explored the philosophy behind a then new wave of mostly U.S. musicians and presented an alternative definition to the New Weird America genre to the one proposed by David Keenan in his 2003 cover story for The Wire magazine.
While Keenan focused on a loosely connected backwoods movement who came together for Vermont's Brattleboro Free Folk Festival, Kleijwegt directed our attention to other 'freaks' like Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunjan and Antony Hegarty.
At the heart of this film were CocoRosie who were shown as the epitome of the kind of free expression encouraged by liberal-minded parents who yearn to see their offspring liberated from the constraints of 'straight' society.
Cocooned and supported by kindred spirits, the Casady sisters have, for well over a decade now, gone their own sweet way while affecting a blissful immunity to critics who label them as precociously self-absorbed and/or irritatingly fey.
Heartache City will be their sixth record and represents a return to basics of sorts. The psychedelic/electronic explorations of the last two records are mostly replaced by what they call "a dusty southern feel with old-timey poetry".
For the ten new songs, they use a simple '4-track' style approach and limit themselves to the kind of acoustic accompaniment, musical toys and antique instruments they used on their debut album 'La Maison du Mon Rêve'
The title of that album, plus the fact that it was recorded in Paris led many to mistakenly assume that the American sisters were French and they have never seemed overly concerned to correct this error.
Somehow, adopting an 'exotic' European background suited their bohemian approach and ensured that their 'art for art's sake' could be proudly worn like a badge of honour.
True to this spirit, Heartache City was conceived in a farm studio in the south of France although the recordings were actually completed in Argentina where it was mixed with engineer Nicolas Kalwillwith.
It is a record in which CocoRosie continue a distinctive exploration of a musical Never Never Land where nursery rhyme-like sentiments combine with more streetwise hip-hop style raps.
The faux innocence that defines CocoRosie's sound is a reminder that 'naivety' is actually an adult trait since kids lack the inexperience needed to make such sophisticated juxtapositions between magical dream-like states and the harshness of 'real life'.
The Tower Of Pisa, for example, begins like a fable:, "There was an old woman who sat in the tree of the side of the road", but the story it tells of a broken family is anything but child-like.
Some of the most striking imagery can be found in the single, Lost Girls, a 'rejoice to be alive' outpouring of spoken word beat poetry ("watery bible rhymes") in the mould of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
In songs like these Bianca and Sierra come over as strong, sassy women yet also reveal a fascination for a world of teen-romance-nostalgia.
Heartache City works because the enigmatic mix of autonomy and vulnerability keeps the listener guessing as to what dark truths lie behind theatrical costumes and clownish make up.
