When Ghost Bees’ Sari and Romy Lightman began busking, passersby didn’t exactly find the twins’ act uplifting. Imagine songs about gaping wounds and complicated childbirths sung in otherworldly harmonies, and you might get some idea of why people at the Halifax Farmers’ Market were more aghast than enthralled.

“We definitely did freak people out,” says Sari, reached in Toronto in the midst of a cross-Canada tour. “It was not intentional! We wanted to please people. But we were still experimenting with sounds. We were eventually asked to leave.”

A twin-sister act (augmented by Ambow Phelps Bondaroff on viola) with freak-folk leanings and no formal training that draws on family history, genocide, and fables for its lyrics, Ghost Bees almost seems like an invention—if someone was smart or original enough to hatch such a concept. In any event, what goes unappreciated by attendees of an East Coast farmers market is like catnip for jaded music journalists.

“I have three cats of my own, so I take that as the highest compliment,” says the 23-year-old. “But yeah, it started as just two sisters singing together. We started when we were kids, and our music has been fuelled by our interest in exploring our voices and performing.”

And Tasseomancy, Ghost Bees’ six-song (plus a hidden track) debut, is definitely one of the most original, and striking, records that’s been released so far this year. Even if the subject matter—Cambodia’s genocidal Pol Pot regime, the Vietnam War, the sisters’ own births—weren’t so arresting, there’s the matter of their harmonies, arrangements, and melodies. Conventional pop hooks are few; the choruses in “Sinai” and “Tear Tassle Ogre Heart” come closest. But the mix of guitar, mandolin, glockenspiel, viola, violin, and accordion is a strange, preternatural brew.

Inevitably, perhaps, references to the new folk movement’s Joanna Newsom come up a lot in Ghost Bees reviews, and Sari is tired of the comparison. “It’s very obvious,” she says. “It feels, these days, most independent female artists creating any kind of contemporary folk music are often typed as Joanna Newsom–like. What she’s doing is pretty incredible, but her roots are more in Appalachian folk music. For us, we’re definitely coming from a sense of more traditional and Eastern European folk music. Then there’s the whole literary aspect.”

That side of Ghost Bees is most obvious in the album’s title track (a biographical sketch of the twins’ maternal great-great-grandmother, a tea-leaf reader who survived pogroms in Russia) and in “Erl King”, based on an old folktale. But Sari, a fan of Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor, says favourite works of fiction also inspire her to write about things she’s interested in that “might not fit into the conventional three- or four-minute song”.

Which, for the decidedly unconventional Ghost Bees, means an occasional image of rotten wombs and divine phlegm that might be a turnoff for the squeamish.

Ghost Bees plays the Railway Club on Wednesday (May 21).