Never

(Rough Trade)

For years, critics of a certain stripe (OK: me) have smugly pronounced that innovation is dead. Then Micachu And The Shapes come along with an album that's so out-there I don't quite have the words ... especially because I'm so busy eating them. This is something I said would never happen again: a record that's daring, scary, difficult, fleetingly beautiful and spectacularly original, but which remains resolutely pop. Micachu and her two Shapes employ a variety of home-made and unorthodox instruments to create a galaxy of sound. Familiar and everyday noises – beginning with a vacuum cleaner and getting odder from there – are distorted and crafted into brief, otherworldly and occasionally deeply disturbing vignettes that somehow (and this is the real genius) burst apart with melody. There are echoes of everything from Disco Inferno to the Beach Boys, though if I was forced to find one reference point I'd suggest the exquisite experimentalism of Godley & Creme, and I don't do praise higher than that. It's pop as art; art as pop; neither; both. At least three-quarters of you will hate it passionately. It's what music should be.