Pitchfork

Camouflaged beneath homemade masks and feathered headgear, Metallic Falcons' Sierra Cassady (CocoRosie) and Matteah Baim go to great lengths to disguise and negate their identities. This same theatrical obscurity extends to the darkened, spacious lullabies on the pair's debut album Desert Doughnuts. Although the duo has termed their creations "soft metal," this open-ended descriptor is insufficient to prepare the listener for entrance into the Falcons' vast and cryptic hemisphere. A luminous construction of blurred Medieval whispers, narcotic guitar figures, and thunderous percussion that reverberates like hoofbeats across the mesa, Desert Doughnuts appears above the dashboard like a mirage, the music's vaporous structure ready at any moment to dissolve into the twilight.

The album was conceived as a songcycle during the duo's shared travels across the American desert, at which time Cassady and Baim claim to have been "transspecied" from desert falcons into their current form. The ramifications of this transformation are unclear, since there is no distinct linear narrative that I can make out. Yet each of these 14 solitary tracks are so much of a piece that the album seems almost to be one single prolonged arpeggio, the Metallic Falcons tracing their hypnotic shadowy arcs like a Sonora-bound Sigur Rós. To listeners familiar with her work in CocoRosie, Cassady is virtually unrecognizable in this expansive landscape-- and not just because of the bird costume. The Falcons' ambitious art-rock gives her much more room to experiment with her impressive, opera-trained vocal range, and the results bear little relation to CocoRosie's insular freak-folk romanticism.

Desert Doughnuts also features appearances by Antony Hegarty, Devendra Banhart, Jana Hunter, and Tarantula A.D. drummer Greg Cosgrove. Despite this amassed firepower, however, the album has a gauzy, distanced production that often sounds as though the musicians and their recording equipment had been purposefully isolated in separate desert canyons. This diffuse recording method lends an appropriate sense of wide-open grandeur to airy tracks like "Desert Cathedral" or "Misty Song", but it does leave one to wonder exactly how many background details might have gotten lost in the wash.

Cosgrove's agile drumming is crucial to the design of complex pieces like "Airships" or the churning "Snakes and Tea", and most often his prog-inspired work is the only element here that makes any direct reference to actual metal techniques. The skeletal guitar on "Berry Metal" or the Hunter-sung "Pale Dog" flashes closer to the post-rock of Flying Saucer Attack than it does to any metal, and the spectral "A Heart of Birdsong" utilizes Banhart's electric guitar in what seems an almost direct homage to Loren Connors' minimalist duets with Suzanne Langille.

On tracks like "Disparu" or the opening processional "Journey", Cassady and Baim's vocals are often a lovely but impenetrable mass of layered whispers, their indistinct enunciation causing many of their lyrics to remain stubbornly elusive. Yet throughout the album the Falcons add subtle, unexpected flourishes-- e.g. the fluttering percussion of "After Metal (Sound of Stars)", or the ambient field recordings of "Ocean"-- to reward the listener's close attention, allowing the duo to wordlessly cast their evocative spells. Mysterious and enrapturing, Desert Doughnuts will leave you eager to learn what other secrets might remain hidden behind the Metallic Falcons' curious disguises.