Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 05/02/07
Label: Universal

Listening to the ultra-hyped debut by the exotic, quixotic Mika is an experience familiar to anyone who has ever babysat a hyperactive, over-tired four-year-old: a ceaseless parade of shrill squealing, restless energy, repetition, irritating playfulness and a tiresome, exhausting need to be looked at and loved. By the end of it you may be mopping up vomit and wishing the brat would just go to sleep.

Of course, even hyperactive four-year-olds can be fun for a while, and opening single "Grace Kelly" - already a Number One - overcomes its coyness and precocity thanks to some brilliant vocal tics and a genuine scampering charm. Over the course of three delirious moments, Mika packs in around three choruses and manages to channel Freddie Mercury, ELO, Sparks, the Bee Gees and even the late, great Billy Mackenzie. And as it's about profound neediness, a condition Mika seems to know extremely well, it serves as the only honest and uncynical song here. Although even that is nearly undone by the smug little "ker-ching" with which the song closes.

But by the time the nursery rhyme, day-glo irritation of second track "Lollipop" breaks out into a tinny sax solo, Mika has already outstayed his welcome. The rest of the record is a succession of try-hard stunts untouched by subtlety or sincerity. "My Interpretation" makes a grab for the housewife demographic, with its cloning of the early Robbie Williams sound, while the gay market is wooed by "Love Today", which sounds exactly like the turgid disco the Scissor Sisters slumped into on their second album, but with the unwise addition of some Queen style vocal grandstanding.

"Relax (Take It Easy)" is marginally more sophisticated, but that can probably be put down to the deft sample of Cutting Crew's "(I Just) Died In Your Arms Tonight". Things get worse on later tracks "Billy Brown" and "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)". The former is a tale of a married man falling in love with - gasp! - another man, a song which wouldn't have been daring in 1961 and now sounds like one of those annoying music hall ditties Damon Albarn used to stick in the middle of Blur albums. And the latter is an offensive, cack-handed love letter to overweight women, albeit a love letter which reads like hate mail, set to a plodding disco beat.

The suspicion that Mika might have major talent under the plagiarism and cynicism is what makes "Life In Cartoon Motion" so remarkably unlovely. Maybe he'll grow up, but it won't be fast enough.

    by Jaime Gill