| Product: |
Life In Cartoon Motion - Mika |
| Date: |
29/02/08 (24 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Grace Kelly and Lollypop are fun enough
Disadvantages: Shoddy lyrics, poor music and uninspired, dull, hateful songs
Mika. You all know who he is, he is the man with the hair, the man who never knowingly sings in a low voice, the man who released the song 'Grace Kelly'. And he's 2007's Lily Allen. Except... Lily Allen, I recall, had an expressive and beautiful voice, and a great collection of songs. Mika seems oddly soulless and patronising. I'm going to skip straight into the review, because on my walkthrough each song description appears to have turned into a rant anyway. Zoinks!
Grace Kelly I believe you may have met. I liked this song SO MUCH when I first heard it.... months ago. Now it's taken the same beating that Hey Ya and You're Beautiful both took at the hands of the radio, and it will be a while until I can enjoy it again. It's faux-rap, with a catchy chorus that's great fun and a strong, strong beat behind it. There's a cool piano piece in it, which doesn't distract, and Mika's voice has been huffed down. Good song, shame it got popular.
"Hey, What's the Big Idea?" A girl calls out before Lollypop, by far the most enjoyable thing on the album, although highly repetitive. Mika does all kinds of different things here, piano, choir, handclaps, vocoder, he even has a child sing one verse (I think that was a technique he should have used more). It's decent enough fun, although it does feel too shiny and spiffy for its own good. Mika's voice, by the way, tends to be like Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters mixed with Freddie Mercury from Queen, if both men were having an off-day. Jake and Freddie are both expressive and entertaining singers, and can create variation and pathos if they want to, on a whim. Mika can't.
You know what you're going to get as soon as My Interpretation begins. "You talk about me/talk about you/and everything I do" Oh wow, it's a poorly written ballad, everyone! It's got this annoying whispery choir, and when it kicks out in the chorus it sounds like Hilary Duff music. Even the piano annoys me! At this point, I'd like to recommend you buy the Scissor Sister's first (first!) album instead of this mess.
I can see where the fun might be in 'Love Today, but Mika sounds so much like Julie Andrews on LSD that there's no bite to the song until he starts dropping the Daniel Bedingfield falsetto and sings 'properly'. I heard this song last year, it was in an advert for [RED] with Chris Kattan, who was dancing around and looking a bit like a prat. Anywho, I digress, the song is another one which is essentially a few meaningless rhymes slotted around the refrain of the title. Is this really the only way to make songs disco anymore? I can see where the fun might be, but I think the only way you'd ever hear this song work is if a proper band took it into the LiveLounge and rocked it up a little. I'd pay good money to hear Snow Patrol have a go.
Relax, Take It Easy. Three guesses what the chorus sounds like. In fairness this isn't too bad, it sounds a bit like what Damon Albarn would have done if he could only ever sing that falsetto he has. And he worked at a circus. Playing an organ. With a monkey playing cowbell. And he was a bad musician. It's got a fidgety keyboard refrain, and his voice sails around at a high pitch capable of cracking plastic. There is a crazy Russian lady at the end of the song, talking about the differences between men and women. Granted she is Russian and it can be hard to tell, but I would've thought this obvious? Casual racism. Awesome. Sorry, I'd rather think about anything than this album.
Any Other World starts off very muted, with wandering synths, before Mika's voice comes in. It sounds exactly the same as it always does, he just can't do this kind of expressive music. The music gives off a sort of Imogen Heap, Kate Havnevik ethereality, but with a jammy voice in the middle of everything, ruining it. There's some quick strings which burst in a few times, but mostly it's you and Mika, and it's a really horrible experience.
The only other worthwhile song on the album is here, Billy Brown. Although even then, after a few listens you'll get bored of it and want to jab needles into your ears so you don't have to hear any more. It's the story of a man who discovers that he is gay, and he runs off with a man, and wow shocking Mika's sexually ambiguous wow. It's all sung as a story though, which makes it better. Not too bad.
Someone's sucking at a straw. Oh, and Mika's around, with a choir and some strange clangy noises. Sounds like he's playing this song with some cutlery - not a bad thing. He also has his synths, of course. He sings about fat girls, who need "a whole lot more" something or other. Essentially the song is about fat-love, which is alright but Queen Morrissey and Ian Dury did it so much better. Especially seeing as this song has one verse and one chorus, which then repeats itself. This is actually one of the better songs on the album, in that it's got a decent beat and Mika's voice is ok. I'm still missing Sister Sledge, though.
Stuck in The Middle has a jaunty showtune to begin with, on piano. Oh the joy. Mika sounds like he's having fun, at least, but hearing the lyrics I feel very depressed. He really can't write a song! It's just poor, and the choir and piano mix seem oddly fake. So this is middle-of-the-road, Jason Donovan stuff. Although having said that, Jason Donovan wasn't all that bad. Too many broken hearts in the world...
A female choir begin Happy Ending, which starts off quite well, actually. Mika doesn't sound too bad, although when he starts trying to express himself the music begins to feel forced and fake again. The second time the choir appear they sound worse, and Mika does these horrible vocal acrobatics whilst in falsetto. Just before three minutes the song becomes a mock-gospel chant. Eventually it ends, but then Mika comes back to evoke one last comparison, and this time it's with an artist he is NEVER going to beat: Jeff Buckley. The song that comes after the final fadeout of Happy Ending is called Ring Ring, I think, and Mika is obviously trying to recall the sound of Buckley's Corpus Christi Carol and no. Just no. You can't reach the strengths of Freddie, why do you think you can channel the fragile beauty of Jeff Buckley? I despair.
Mika isn't my favourite person. I used to really like him, but this album is fake. It's fake. It sounds plastic and shiny and too polished for any real depth to be seen. As a disco record, most of the music is second-rate and unfit for cruise singers (some cruise singers are good, too). The album sounds cheap and overproduced, and Mika's voice is incapable of inspiring anything but mild annoyance at best. When he's good, he's average When he's poor he's a terrible, terrible musician. I can recommend none of the songs, and won't. What you've got is a collection of half-assed showtunes and piss-poor singing. Which could maybe have been okay, had the writing or musical accompaniment been up to anything, but the writing is so bad you want to find Mika and attach him to a rocket, stick all the copies of this crap down his shirt, fire him into a mountain made of pure acid, and drop a large rock on top of him, just to be sure.
To get perspective on this album, I had to listen several times to these songs. I still haven't recovered.
Summary: Mika is a musical abomination
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