If CocoRosie’s sonic odds and ends were stripped of all their bells and whistles – farm animal noises, Fisher-Price blips, party-hat kazoos – if this was CocoRosie Unplugged (and someone slapped that crickety Joanna Newsom cowl out Bianca’s throat), would the songwriting stand on its own? Would there even be songs?

Fragile kittens like “”By Your Side”” off their 2004 debut were too fascinatingly novel to bother with such questions; long-lost sisters Bianca (Coco, the cackler/rapper) and Sierra (Rosie, the gentler, opera-trained traditionalist) danced emaciated rituals around their hollow, bone-rattling, freak-folk cauldron, somewhere deep in the dankest Paris bedroom, with enough convincing insanity to keep the critics at bay. But after an unfortunate swell of hype, an unsurprising (if beautiful) followup and, now, their third and most heavily (and Icelandically) produced installment, the CocoRosie noise often frees us from its trance long enough to ask what, exactly, is going on here. Bianca’s slithery sob stories, etched in her own glittery pink blood, twitter with the most mundane of girly woes: metaphoric life rollercoasters, nostalgic happy places and why we can’t all get along.

In truth, a handful of the songs could probably hold up if stripped down – Sierra’s voice has all the operatic glow of My Brightest Diamond, and songs like the Devendra Banhart-penned “”Houses”” would sound, well, like Devendra Banhart. But bouncy-ball samples, broken music boxes and beat-box techno can only stay exciting for so long, and reciting your middle-school poems like Bjork or Ono in her awkward stage doesn’t make you any artier than the next tortured hipster.