He was a (ska) punk (singer), she didn’t do ballet but came damn close with her time spent singing with an Opera Children’s Chorus and featuring in musicals before the duo, Mike and Mandy, met professionally in LA while working in Shakespeare play and married three years later.
Notably, the duo didn’t let their time spent in the theatrical trenches go to waste, going by their latest poetically magnetic leftfield trip-hop track, Caught the Bug, which takes the iconic styles of PJ Harvey and Massive Attack and the edge of She Drew the Gun and Black Honey and entwines the two sonically delicious facets to deliver a cinematically immersive hit that will entice you with the force of a tornado.
With both sides of the power couple bringing swathes of influence to the table, their genre-bending tracks don’t discriminate where they pull motifs from. Between them, Mike and Mandy have an affinity in everything from acid-jazz to funk to alt-country to rock n roll to art rock; listen closely when you tune into Caught the Bug and you’ll hear signatures in all that and more around the hypnotically demure vocals which will give you a lesson in demure vindication.
Catch the fever by streaming Caught the Bug via Spotify.
Review by Amelia Vandergast