Micachu & The Shapes - Never

All hail Micachu, with her drawling urchin voice and clattering percussion! Revel in her lack of regard for ordinary song structures! Swoon when she decides to plop a soaring chorus in amongst the mess of treated guitar and unfathomable noises! Bop to the warped grooves she crams onto her new record, Never!

As you might guess from that unabashed marketing, reader, I am quite a fan of Micachu and her Shapes. Her debut Jewellery was a gem (ahem) of alternative universe pop which threw hummable melodies together with the sounds of hoovers, sloppy detuned guitars and curious programmed bleeps/beats and somehow managed to be pretty accessible. It was one that was good enough that I downloaded it, liked it and intended to buy it, then ACTUALLY DID. Which is rare, as normally that wise and noble plan goes down the crapper when I get excited about some other music. 

Anyway, to the record in question. What it affirms is that Micachu & The Shapes are a punk outfit – not in the sense of power chords or pseudo-politics here, but in the way the constantly shun convention. In the murky world of Never, you can't be sure when some weird noise that functions as a riff will run away with the song, or what the hell kind of instrument can make that noise, or whether the hoover will come back again to clean your ears out. I'm in the stage with this record where, after a few complete listens, I'm beginning to feel the grooves and hooks, but it's still very dense and unpredictable. Even when Mica settles down into singing a verse or chorus or whatever, the Shapes are always messing with the backing, adding little sounds, bashing pots and pans and so on, which keeps everything exciting and energised. With headphones, you can hear a lot of tasty layering in the big rushes of sound which sometimes burst out of the songs.

With this punk spirit, Never drops some of the pop sensibility which made Jewellery so accessible. Nonetheless, there is still room for straight up singalong moments, especially the stomping Low Dogg and the transcendent chorus of Nothing. In the rest of the songs, the pop is still there, just buried to greater and lesser degrees, waiting for keen ears to dig it up. The opening thrash of Easy is followed by Never, and Waste, each of which clock under 2 minutes and get the album going in a galloping fashion which hardly lets up for the 35 minute running time. The one pause for reflection is well placed near the end of the record. The brief Top Floor serenely leads into Fall, which brings back the moody feel of last year's Chopped & Screwed collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, before the uplifting ¾ wooze of Nothing and urgent blast of Nowhere end Never on a massive high. I'm always a fan of a strong close to a record, and these last four make up the best ending run I've heard in ages. Nothing is only a little marred by the needless verse guest-sung by the plain Wesley Gonzalez, which would have been much better sung by Mica herself. Other highlights I ought to mention are the anaemic sitar-like riff for Holiday, the churning OK, with its familiar Within You, Without You verse melody, and the rush of the dumb beat driving You Know. The thing is, the more I listen, the more awesome bits I find in these songs, and if that isn't recommendation enough then I don't know what is.

p.s. there are videos for all the songs on your tube.