Micachu and the Shapes - Lips

by Pop Tarts Suck Toasted on Tue, 2009/04/07 - 5:00pm Post to Twitter

You know that little tuner that every band carries around, plugs into, and checks constantly throughout their shows? Well it turns out that little box isn’t really necessary to create incredibly catchy and addictive pop music, just ask Mica Levi. Levi, better known as Micachu, has decided to tune her guitar in a totally different manner and I highly doubt there’s a tuning pedal that’s caught up with her yet. On her debut album with her band the Shapes, Micachu explores the crazy artsy side of music while making it absolute pop music, complete with hooks, sing-a-long choruses, and enough funky dance beats to get your feet moving. Jewellery is a dynamic, occasionally confusing record but we’ll get to that a bit later.

As the album begins we are treated to a quick blast of Levi’s oddly tuned, little guitar. The strums quickly give way to a synthetic sound and a drum blast before her vocals come in. Get used to the way she’s singing "Vulture", as she uses this monotonous vocal cadence through most of the record which leads to a bit of the confusion between tracks. This cadence adds a bit to the catchiness of it all, adding another rhythm to the fray and allowing everything to blend together. The album continues on, short song after short song, tricking you into believing you know what’s coming next until, bam, she changes it up. It could be a missing chorus where one should be, or the fact that that chorus comes in just a few bars later, or it could be that you’re finally figuring out where a song is going and then, bam, it’s over. On first listen all the changes to the pop song structure might seem disconcerting or a bit pretentious, but over the course of repeated listens it proves to just be a clever trick, that is half of what Micachu and the Shapes is all about.

The album is rife with songs under 2-minutes long that totally obliterate everything you though you knew about the structure of pop songs. Micachu experiments with quirky sounds and her oddly tuned 6-string throughout the record, giving Jewellery an exciting new sound. It borders on the world of noise rock, but it’s decidedly way to hi of a fi to fall into that. Instead Micachu tends towards the punk realm with short pop songs that don’t follow the songwriters code at all. Of course most people don’t hear the standard three chord punk sound so you’ll rebel against that classification, but deep down that’s all this is.

As crazed and experimental as this album can be it still manages to hook itself into your head. It’ll immediately replace that "Filet-o-fish" jingle in your head and may stick for far longer then that ever could. The one drawback to Jewellery is that occasionally the songs can blend together a bit because Levi’s never changing cadence, but the music is almost always enough to get passed that.
Micachu & the Shapes - "Lips"
Micachu & the Shapes - "Calculator"