Micachu and The Shapes, The Borderline, London

is a tiny woman with a boyish look, mini-guitars which look like toys and and old T-shirt that’s too big for her worn over jeans. The Shapes are a discrete keyboardist and drummer. Together they produce an amazing set, lead by the anti-songstress who composes as she breathes and knows intuitively how to use her extraordinary voice and instruments.

Between very high- and low-pitched sounds, she develops a musical colour all of her own. She is suspended in adolescence; but only in that she keeps the most interesting things, aesthetically speaking, of this age: a taste for radical experiments (a ‘GameBoy version’ of Laurel Collective’s ‘Vuitton Blues’ - let’s be twelve again!), a regressive attitude towards her guitar, used as an endless source of effects and discoveries which allows her to find the sounds of her adulthood, a sense of carefree, an ease which only highlights the cleverly wrought structure of these mock-simple beats. And the topics of her songs (‘Worst Bastard’) are evident of a teenage weariness and wisdom. Her influences range from nursery rhymes to state-of-the-art screams.

It’s hard to label her as ‘pop’, ‘rock’, or ‘electro’ because what she’s doing is so personal and so rare. It’s tempting to dub it club music, because it’s really great to dance to. But, mind you, it’s also made to be listened to, because it’s really, really worth it. Micachu goes easily from one style to another: here, a Led Zep attitude, mad at her guitar; there, something Oriental, but used in such a relevant matter that there’s nothing kitschy about it; now it’s something jazzy in the vocals, or a country sound of sorts.

This girl is over-talented, and shows it off with simplicity. Seeing her on stage, you feel that this is where she belongs and making music is just what she’s designed to do. Some of the songs she plays have been composed just a few days or hours earlier, and they make as much sense as the rest. Just great.