- Label
- Rough Trade
- Release date
- 9th March 2009
- Genre
- Experimental
- Buy this album
- Order CD
Left-field electronica auteur unveils singular debut album
Micachu is the alter ago of a 21-year-old Guildhall School of Music and Drama student named Mica Levi, and with her occasional two-piece band the Shapes she creates the wonkiest pop imaginable.
It’s no surprise to learn that her sole previous release was a grime mixtape and that she frequently takes to the stage armed with a petite guitar and a Hoover: this debut album is abstruse, adventurous, abrasive and unfolds under its own idiosyncratic, determinedly off-beat terms.
Sounds and beats, both analogue and digital, bleep and hiss in and out of Jewellery at will. Everything is tangential, and thus central. Matthew Herbert’s glitch-pop-friendly producer’s hand is visible, and yet the fractured vision and allusive poetry are all Levi’s: “I’m wearing my expressionless face” she deadpans on the Gorillaz-like Floor, while the chugging Vulture could be the Ting Tings’ Katie White fronting The Fall.
A capricious debut, Jewellery is allusive dream-pop for those who dream in colour.
Also to try:
Annette Peacock: Abstract-Contact
Acoustic Ladyland: Skinny Grin
Andrew Bird: Armchair Apocrypha
