Miles will be playing an intimate one-off show this Sunday (May 3rd) to warm up for his upcoming UK tour in support of Transgressive's release of his debut album across Europe on May 18th. He'll be backed by a brand new line up of Brooklyn's finest including David Jack Daniels (drums), Marques Toliver (violin) and Will Cameron (bass).
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Micachu Collaborates!
Mica is going to collaborate with other young, talented, and fabulous lady musicians for ActionAid. Check out project details here
Monday, April 20, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Micachu Pitchfork Track Reviews
No one writes verbose synchophantic serenades to music fans like Pitchfork! God bless 'em.
Here are track reviews for Golden Phone and Calculator.
Brian Howe writes, "Other bands, are you even trying? We choose you Micachu!" Wowza.
Here are track reviews for Golden Phone and Calculator.
Brian Howe writes, "Other bands, are you even trying? We choose you Micachu!" Wowza.
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson UK Press
Fun Micachu Press
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Micachu + Jewellery = 7.9
Pitchfork.com weigh in on Micachu's debut album, Jewellery, calling it " the freshest thing to come along so far in 2009". We couldn't agree more.
The first sound on Micachu and the Shapes' debut album is an acoustic guitar, so what else is new. But what Mica Levi is playing isn't a chord anyone's heard before-- it's a dry, gnashingly dissonant cluster, and she's hammering away at it very intentionally. A few seconds into "Vulture", she's joined by the other two members of the band, drummer Marc Pell and keyboardist Raisa Khan, who act as if Levi's actually just playing some kind of giddy surf riff. By the time the song skids to a halt, less than three minutes later, it's made a few hairpin turns into and back out of grime/carousel-music fusion while Levi's been chanting and whooping lyrics about her inedibility in a proud, largely indecipherable LDN accent. On a first listening, it's maddening noise; by the fourth or so, it's as catchy as a jingle.
Jewellery is a chaotic record, and an enormous mess. It's also, pretty much, the freshest thing to come along so far in 2009. Levi belongs to the generation that's grown up with the total availability of every kind of music ever, and she wants to play it all at the same time as she's text-messaging, so it's a good thing that pop plus anything equals pop. She's got highbrow compositional bonafides ("influences" listed on the band's MySpace page: "harry partch, and all those other guys"); she's got some U.K. hip-hop cred (her mixtape Filthy Friends is even more of a pileup); she's a little bit rock'n'roll (the fuse that ignites the album's best song, "Calculator", is the guitar riff from "Tequila"). "Sweetheart" is a high-tech, neon-butterfly take on the hardcore punk two-step. At least one song prominently features a vacuum cleaner. Nothing stays in place for more than a few seconds, but very often her avant-gardist and party-time impulses snap together, as when the scrape-and-tweak that opens "Lips" abruptly congeals into a wiry bhangra groove. It's not clear, though, how much the insanely clever arrangements are the band's and how much they're producer Matthew Herbert's.
At the center of this cyclone of jujubes and sandpaper is Levi's tart, snaggy voice, which occasionally recalls Lora Logic's dizzy trill but more often ducks down into the mix and clings to no more than a couple of notes. (It's probably perverse to wonder how awesome it would be if the group collaborated with a really good R&B singer.) Levi is one of the most androgynous-sounding woman vocalists I've heard in years-- pitch her down a percent or two and she could pass for Mike Skinner-- but her persona isn't quite post-sex: while most of her rare intelligible lyrics concern the romantic conundrum, they're generally brushing it off metaphorically ("I could eat your heart", she yodels) or literally ("I won't have sex 'cause of S.T.D.s").
Mostly, though, Jewellery is a vehicle to show off the band's hoard of shiny new sounds-- although they haven't yet figured out how to sort out the gemstones they've got in abundance from their ice chips and broken glass. It's not a record built for staying power, despite the thrilling moments in almost every song. But its failures mostly have to do with idea-overload and short attention span, which are very promising problems to have on one's first album. Levi and her band sound more like the future than the past, at a moment when we desperately need some more future, and as much as I've come to dig this album's awkward, brash cacophony, I want to hear what they do next even more.
— Douglas Wolk, April 15, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Buriedfed Video
New video for "Buriedfed", first single from the self titled debut album, set for release on Transgressive Records 18th May
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