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Mika 'Life In Cartoon Motion' Album
Review
Some curly-haired camp Lebanese geezer top of the charts –
who’d have thought it, eh? If you love Grace Kelly
(and, let’s face it, it would be hard not to), then it’s a
near certainty that you’ll also love Mika’s album, Life In
Cartoon Motion.
High-camp, bouncy, upbeat and fun, there sure is nothing
subtle about it but it makes for a swaggeringly confident and
brash debut. At times, Mika’s influences are far too obvious
and range on the derivative – Queen crossed with the Scissor
Sisters, the Freddie Mercury swooping falsetto on Grace
Kelly was no one-off, with Love Today proving the
most in danger of Scissor plagiarism – and his try-hard
attempts to be overly quirky lead to too much in the way of
silly voices (slightly pervy kids’ voices on Lollipop,
random woman chatter at the end of the otherwise sublime
electro of Relax, Take It Easy) and tiresome jokes (the
predictable denouement to plodding nursery rhyme Billy
Brown). But when music is this relentlessly happy, you can
forgive it these few sins.
I don’t know whether it’s a very durable album, in the sense
that so much buoyancy becomes insufferable after a while (like
those people who manage to be bright-eyed and busy-tailed
without fail even at 9am on a Monday morning). The sing-a-long
fabulousness of Lollipop and Big Girl (You Are
Beautiful) is initially wonderful but whether these will
soon settle to the status of elevated novelty songs remains to
be seen. It might be that the soaring rock-pop My
Interpretation has the greater staying power. Overall
though, this is a welcome burst of sunshine into a cold
miserable January. If Mika is the new big thing and we’re only
at the start of 2007, we certainly have much to look forward
to.
ON REPEAT: Grace Kelly, My Interpretation,
Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)
PRESS SKIP: Billy Brown, the sickening choir of My
Happy Ending and the shockingly bad choirboy hidden track
at the end of it
Rachel Read
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