"The Boy Who Knew Too Much" - Review from smh.com.au

[mari62]

MIKA

The Boy Who Knew Too Much (Universal)

 

Reviewed by Bernard Zuel

September 18, 2009

 

 

Two years ago, Mika Penniman, once of Lebanon, lately of London, landed like a fuel-injected children's television host — vibrant clothes, wide-eyed enthusiasm and frenetic energy, all with a touch of camp.

 

Like the Scissor Sisters and the Feeling but twice as in-your-face, his songs didn't just wear his love of the '70s on their sleeves, they shouted it with the fervour of someone who had offered up first-borns and tithed their soul to the gods Freddie Mercury and Elton John in the First Church of Holy Disco Pop.

 

The appropriately named album Life in Cartoon Motion was highly sweetened and sometimes just plain irritating in its heavily worked childishness. But frequently enough it was so damn catchy and fun that you had to sing along with Grace Kelly, Love Today or Lollipop and concede that My Interpretation, Billy Brown and Any Other World were well crafted. He was a pop star who loved both parts of that job description and, better yet, looked like earning it.

 

Rather than: "can he do it again?", album No. 2 is preceded by the question: "would it be wise to do it again?" Wisely, perhaps, Mika probably isn't listening to either question. From the trying-very-hard We Are Golden, with its Alice Cooper/Pink Floyd children's chant and the quasi-Bee Gees falsetto tight-trousering its way through Rain to the updated music hall of Good Gone Girl and the barbershop quartet does Mary Poppins of Toy Boy, there are enough irritations alongside the hooks to grate on even the most sainted of listeners.

 

But then he pulls off a well-tempered weepy such as Pick up Off the Floor, coming across like Jimmy Sommerville covering Elton John, or takes the pub singalong and dresses it in a big-collared shirt and satin flares in Dr John and you start begrudgingly smiling. You then notice that you don't mind the Mika-doing-Scissor Sisters-doing-Queen of Touches You and you may even believe him in the dramatic ballad I See You. That's when you are vulnerable to the sugary blitz of Blame It on the Girls, with the kind of nagging attraction that means you'll wake up with it in your head one morning and it will never leave.

 

It's a pop record, with all that that means. You have been warned.

 

http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/music/gig-reviews/the-boy-who-knew-too-much/2009/09/18/1253208992224.html

[melgo]

That was interesting.

[silver]

"you'll wake up with it in your head one morning and it will never leave"

 

Oh yes, that's the Mika effect all right