MICACHU Jewellery Rough Trade ****It was always a fanciful notion that 2009 was going to be the year of the electro-pop lass. That's what many tipsters believed in January – only a few short weeks ago, remember – when they declared that this year would see the likes of Lady Gaga and Little Boots make the public forget all those nasty economic woes and be happy to vogue like it was 1988 all over again. Yet the new electropop intake contained more than just glossy ladies with synths.
On one hand, 21-year-old Londoner Mici Levi ticks all the right boxes. She’s female, and she makes electro-pop, after a fashion. But when you hear Jewellery, you soon realise that Levi and her band The Shapes are playing a completely different game.
Jewelleryis a glorious, rumbustious, enthralling, spiky and exuberant mess. There are times when you wonder if Levi and producer Matthew Herbert have wilfully conspired to leave in all the glitches, buzzes and fuzzy bits. It means that potentially fantastic pop songs are slashed to a two- minute dash and magnificent collages of sound are daubed with unlikely bleeps and squawks. It's a mess, but you wouldn't have it any other way.
Levi knows what she’s doing. Before Rough Trade came calling (and she’s easily that label’s most inspired signing in an age), she’d already played the classical game and wrote a piece for Mark- Anthony Turnage and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Her wonky pop owes lots to previous dalliances with folk, grime, dubstep, blues and everything else that caught her ears.
Jewelleryis a DIY distillation of all of those twitching soundtracks. Combining sounds that should never even be on kissing terms with one another, every note of this 35-minute album is imaginative, mind-boggling and mischievous.
And yes, the album really does sound as if it’s coming from a much better, brighter place. www.myspace.com/micayomusic
Download tracks: Lips, Curly Teeth, Golden Phone
