...a couple of weeks ago, i had the good fortune of being taken along to a gig by a close friend and leaving the sweaty little basement feeling speechless. Its a rare thing to arrive unsuspecting at a little venue on the toilet circuit and come home with your ears still ringing from the melodies of the person you've just seen perform, rarer still when those tunes still swim about in your head the morning after that. "Micachu and the shapes" is what they call themselves, and its the first time this side of 2008 that i've felt completely excited by a new band. They're music is wild in the Captain Beefheart sense, melancholy in The Raincoats circa Odyshape (shouting out loud) way, percussive and tribal in a Creatures/Siouxsie manner and....this is only on the live side of things. On record its a different kettle of fish. Mica, the singer, is a grime producer as well, she's remixed Toddla T, and worked with some of the guys from Man like Me and Naked and the Boys. To add to that she is also an innventor of her own instruments, so far she's made a bizarre guitar/harp/drone instrument with a foot pedal attached to it that allows you to vary the pitch of some of the strings as you play it. Their recorded songs to date are edgy pieces, lots of anxious sounding drum beats, made from a mixture of electronic bleeps and found-sounds. These elements all blend into their music to create something very bizarre but also effortless sounding too, imagine Jamie T but as a girl, Moon Dog being born in 1985 and given a laptop for his 20th birthday or Siouxsie Sioux with an androgynous voice and an obsession with heart-break rather than gothic stuff. Enough talk, have a listen to this and then click here for more.
William.
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