Rough Trade Us
2009
Jewellery
About This Album
It's not often that an album as equally bonkers and catchy as Jewellery comes along, but then, an artist as genre-defying as Micachu and her band the Shapes isn't a particularly frequent occurrence, either. Micachu, aka Mica Levi, is a classically trained composer and instrumentalist, but she revels in sounds that are anything but polite and restrained -- in fact, she goes out of her way to turn the most outlandish, seemingly "wrong" sounds into addictively, hyperactively catchy songs. For Jewellery, she teamed up with kindred spirit Matthew Herbert, and together they remind listeners how much more there can be to electronic pop than some lazy loops here and some copy-paste there. Songs like "Vulture" and "Sweetheart" burn through ideas at a whiplash pace, picking up one sound for a few beats before tossing it aside for something shinier, or more accurately, noisier: the album is filled with distortion, be it crisp or cloudy, but it's used artfully; Jewellery's energy may be reckless, but its sounds are "detailed," as on "Lips," which uses a kiss as a percussion fill (clearly, Micachu brought out Herbert's most playful side).
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10)

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