Maddy Costa 

Micachu and the Shapes: Never – review

Mica Levi's strange, clattering pop cacophony is familiar from her 2009 debut, but still sounds like nobody else, writes Maddy Costa
  
  


We've been here before, right down to the vacuum cleaner that briefly sucks up all the sound in the opening track, Easy. The hyperactive, argumentative twang and clatter and throb and scratch of detuned guitars and video-game synths and makeshift drums and hammering footsteps and broken glass and metal buttons that rattle around the inside of a washing machine: all of it is familiar from Micachu and the Shapes' debut album, Jewellery. But it's a mark of how far ahead of the genre-splicing, pop-distorting game Mica Levi was in 2009, that no matter how much this follow-up apparently repeats previous ideas, it still sounds vital and fresh. What it adds is a bit more polish, production-wise: sounds bounce boldly across and against each other, so they seem to move at cross-purposes, yet with coherent urgency. But the album's impulse is always impish, its playfulness beaming out from the We Will Rock You stomp of Low Dogg and the scuffed, surf-pop harmonies of Holiday.

 

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