Review: Micachu And The Shapes – Jewellery (2009)
Here’s what might seem like another addition to this weird cult we have of adding extra letters to common words. We can only assume this phenomenon is the repressed 20-years-late rebuttal to wicked-awesome metal band names like Def Leppard, Bigg Nife, and Stryper. Don’t be concerned, however. It’s just the British spelling of the word, and we don’t need to send in the National Guard until they start using umlauts. If they start removing vowels again (see Mstrkrft), may God help us all.
Thankfully, the artist’s name is Micachu (not Micacku, as the cover might suggest), which is only a mash-up of frontwoman Mica Levi’s first name and the ubiquitous anime critter Pikachu, or The Rat In The Hat, as he is called in certain circles. Having picked her moniker up as a regular DJ and MC on London’s grime scene (she’s a native Brit), she rolls with two other regulars who have been named the Shapes, ostensibly so they can paint nice colorful swatches on t-shirts and presto! – fast as you please, they have a matching wardrobe theme.
Just as their name and presentation seems slapdash, so does their music. Now, lack of care for the craft can be a dangerous mistress. But rest assured, no group this idiosyncratic could ignore the details. Just seeing them perform live dispels such a notion, as so many of the minutiae of the album are captured live in one manner or another. They pack in some of the oddest homemade instruments, even doctoring up the ones they’ve bought — weaving a playing card between the strings of a guitar, hammering strings instead of strumming them — it all makes for one of the most interesting displays of musicality this year, and like Dan Deacon it comes from the mind of a classically trained musician.
Slowly and surely, it builds to an undeniably catchy patchwork, but it might feel like a gigantic aural mess at the start of “Vulture,” hearing Mica’s “Chu” guitar threatening to disintegrate under her harried strums. In fact, there’s the occasional fibrous snap in the foreground of “Floor,” and you’ll probably think its fragile neck has finally given way. It hasn’t, though – and it jams atonally throughout Jewellery in an amazingly fitting and cohesive fashion for all its shoddy tone, a reality which the catchiness of the songs appears to belie. There might even be some quarter-tone dabbling here, but Mica’s strummings are more of a color than anything else; they serve as a basic platform for the schizoid samples and synthesizers to build upon.
Micachu and the Shapes’ “Curly Teeth.”
So many different timbres and tones have gone into creating sturdy little polyrhythms (“Curly Teeth”); blips and bleeps here, squeeks and squawks there, and even a digital smooch on “Lips.” The music is literally so A.D.D. that it spins out of control for moments here and there, making way for just about every studio whim, including sustained dissonant organ chords (“Golden Phone”), rumbling screeches and scratches (“Ship”), and good lord, a vacuum cleaner (“Turn Me Well”). Somehow, though, it all rolls inscrutably together into a darling and youthful collection of art-pop.
Graciously, the album is full of bite-sized tracks, none longer than 3:30, and four under two minutes. The ideas that don’t work are few and far in between, and they don’t end up lingering all that long to begin with. It’s hard to argue with that, and it really keeps the action moving and the album fresh and light.
At times, it’s appeared that European art-pop crept its way onto a Manhattan-bound cultural galleon, only to surreptitiously explode Stateside like some breed of musical Kudzu. Having shouldered the burden of this remarkably resilient (and indeed, territorial) genre, we have looked in particular to cities like Athens, Austin, Manhattan, and Seattle to churn out the entirety of the world’s crop of weirdo bands that will make this kind of music marketable. But no, this is where our analogy breaks down, because bands like Micachu and the Shapes have again brought some maddeningly original species from across the pond, like some anachronistic peace offering. And now we’re all gathered around it, scratching our heads and trying to figure out how to digest it. Ah, well. Hendrix was big over there before he was anything here, so maybe we’ve just been paying it back and forward for the last fifty years.
Mica and her friends have a tremendously appealing, riffy art-pop album on their hands, and it’s sure to be a winner this year. Just as drummer Marc Pell states excitedly at the close of “Wrong:” “that’s a keeper, that’s a keeper!” You said it, brother. Jewellery is bling for your stereo.
