thu 12/12/2024

CD: Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta - Chopped & Screwed | reviews, news & interviews

CD: Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta - Chopped & Screwed

CD: Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta - Chopped & Screwed

Post-punk star has created something outside the framework of pop

Micachu's 'Chopped & Screwed': Rough Trade dabble in contemporary classical for a change
Forget Lady Gaga – Mica Levi, aka Micachu, is modern pop’s true maverick. More likely to sport jeans and T-shirt than frock of flesh, she’s a skinny, scruffy tomboy who can hold her own in a game of keepie-uppie. Her take on music is similarly unassuming, but it’s also, genuinely, extraordinary. Debut album Jewellery, originally recorded for Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label but then snapped up by Rough Trade, deserved to be classed as pop, in her own eyes, because it comprised “short songs, with choruses and verses”. But its wonky and defiantly lo-fi tunes, hammered out on a tiny, charity-shop acoustic guitar, were never going to bother the charts.
 
Forget Lady Gaga – Mica Levi, aka Micachu, is modern pop’s true maverick. More likely to sport jeans and T-shirt than frock of flesh, she’s a skinny, scruffy tomboy who can hold her own in a game of keepie-uppie. Her take on music is similarly unassuming, but it’s also, genuinely, extraordinary. Debut album Jewellery, originally recorded for Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label but then snapped up by Rough Trade, deserved to be classed as pop, in her own eyes, because it comprised “short songs, with choruses and verses”. But its wonky and defiantly lo-fi tunes, hammered out on a tiny, charity-shop acoustic guitar, were never going to bother the charts.
 
My head is nodding involuntarily to the strings. Maybe the Dogg in the title is Snoop

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