Album Review: Micachu and The Shapes - Never

Mica Levi is a lovely anomaly on the indie-pop arena. She's effectively degenerated pop convention and style to its basest core then spliced it all together in a Frankensteinian endeavour gleaning bizarrely infectious results. Her 2009 debut Jewellery was well ahead of its time, experimenting with form and tempo to create songs that were more like anarchic collages of more generic fare, infused with neon and toys. The hyperactive artistry was affronting in its punk aesthetic, yet the end result was an incredibly savvy step into another realm, a playful performance founded in having fun.

Never doesn't overtly mix with this formula – apart from some spit and polish thrown into the production – as there really isn't one. Easy uses the vacuum as a sonic tool, something that could almost be called a Micachu staple. The chugging riffs and industrial sounds of Waste, undercut by Levi's reverb-heavy, cut-and-paste vocals, blend into Slick, using toy keyboard beats, eclectic instrumentation and warbling vocals to break up the skeletal twee elements that underpin it. Low Dogg is a killer tune, driven by 8-bit hip hop beats that MIA could pull off if she wasn't concerned about maintaining her street cred. Further diversions into parallel worlds are offered in the tape-chewed surf-bop of Holiday, whilst the darker Nothing, complete with cameo croons from Marc Pell, is incredible in the way it revels in its unease.

Never is a cheekily rendered scrapbook of genres, all put through the prism of neon ingenuity and crackpot invention. Levi, like contemporary Tune-Yards, is intent on destroying all notions of what makes a pop song, and Never proves that such endeavours should be celebrated.