The Sound Before the Meaning

MiChi was born in Japan in 1985 and spent years circulating through Tokyo’s underground before anyone outside the country paid much attention. She sings in a fluid blend of Japanese and English that should feel like a calculated crossover decision but somehow doesn’t—the two languages sit together until the syllables stop being words and become something closer to texture. By the second listen I’d stopped tracking what she was actually saying.

Her single PROMiSE dropped in October 2008, and it comes packaged with a cover of Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boi that has no business working but does. That song is a perfect little fossil from early-2000s teen radio—skateboard posturing and melodrama encoded in three chords—and running it through MiChi’s production sensibility should produce something embarrassing. Instead it produces something fun, which is almost more irritating, because now I have to admit I like it.

I don’t need to follow every lyric to know when a song has something. This one has something.