Shapeshifting genius Mica Levi does dream-pop with scorched, screwed effect somewhere between MBV, Spacemen 3 and Arthur Russell, and now available on its first vinyl pressing with their own label. Thanks to pressing plant lags the physical item ‘Ruff Dog’ finally appears six months after the digital release, and following very much in the vein of their back-to-basics garage scuzz album with Good Sad Happy Bad. However, this is Mica solo, stripped to raw, jangly guitars and drums that sound like they were recorded in her bathroom, emphasising a kind of janky, DIY directness and fidelity that’s always been at the heart of their music, but rarely heard so sore and wickedly strung out as they do here.  Has Mica Levi ever made a bad record? --- Self Released, 2021

It appears that the award-winning composer is here joined by their Curl collective in ‘Blue Alibi’ for an album that almost preternaturally collapses the vernacular of grunge rock, free jazz, indie-pop, rap, and chamber music, into scenes limned with the skill of a proper soundtrack scorer. At this point we’re just going to refer to this style as Mica Music, because for all intents and purposes, there’s just nobody making anything quite like it in the modern sphere. It’s the type of music that would puzzle a computer tasked with classifying its taxonomy, all asymmetric, bittersweetly discordant and metered off-centre in a way that defies categorisation. While there’s no explicit mention of lockdown fuckries, aside from Brother May’s “middle finger to Boris Johnson and all the cops now” on the album’s bitterly puckered ace ‘Om Om Om Om’, the album’s sore blue pallor certainly feels like it was sculpted by the experience, or is implicitly realised as a salve for it. From the scratchy, free-jazz Company-isms and deadpan vox of ‘Whack’, to the mumbly introspection of ‘Rose’, thru the Sub-pop styles of ‘Liquorice’, and exquisite nap anxiety ambient in ‘Monk’ and ‘Blue Shit’, or the devastating torpor of ‘Waves’ and biley reflux of Flying Nun-esque guitars in ‘Outro’, it’s an ideal soundtrack to miserable, locked down times. --- 2021

Issued somewhere between Mica Levi’s emergence in 2008, and their recent gush of solo and band releases with Curl and Good Sad Happy Bad, Mica wrote and recorded ‘Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill’ around about the time they were receiving award-nominations and resounding acclaim for their soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer film, ‘Under The Skin.’ Naturally it shares some of that OST’s tones and moods, but the results are far more febrile, lush rather than dark and tense, stitching together a tapestry like mixtape-cum-production showreel of curdled chamber pieces, shrugged hip hop, ambient flights of fancy and gorgeous snatches of strings recalling the intervals of Carl Craig and Derrick May’s seminal ‘Relics’ set going into what sound like early sketches for what would become Tirzah’s ‘Devotion’ album a few years later. Replete with new, minimalist artwork symbolic of the album’s enigmatic nature, the record’s second wind is arguably ideally timed for the world’s current state of torpor and tentative anticipation, with 60 minutes of figurative, quietly perplexing, evocative melodies that work by inference as opposed to ever beating you around the head with a message. It’s peppered with some exquisite, often unexpected moments that arrive and recede into its matrix with uncanny logic that perhaps comes as close as you’ll get to living inside Mica’s iridescent, endlessly intriguing mind. --- DDS, 2021