Mika: The Boy Who Knew Too Much review in THE TIMES 18/09/09

[daisylou]

just managed to get hold of the paper and saw another review!

 

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/cd_reviews/article6838724.ece

 

3 out of 5 stars

by

Pete Paphides

 

For many, the problem with Mika was summed up by the closing seconds of his debut hit Grace Kelly: “Ker-ching!” With the final chord of his sure-fire chart-topper fading, the former boy soprano could no longer keep a lid on his delight with the song that he wrote as a screw-you to the record companies who told him to tone down his act. It was impossible to proffer an opinion about Grace Kelly without disclosing your feelings about a camp, half-Lebanese singer-songwriter cursed by an inability to walk into a crowded room without a show of jazz hands. In pop terms, it was kind of a gauche thing to do. But the clue to Mika’s intentions was in the song title. If you school yourself on enough 1950s musicals, you start to see the plot twists of your life in similar terms. In Mika’s internal narrative, Grace Kelly was the moment when the plucky protagonists write the song that proves their nay-sayers wrong and propels them into the big time.

 

In the interim, two years of bona fide pop stardom have done little to make Mika meeker. Serving notice of his second album, the recent single We Are Golden was admirable for the loftiness of its objectives. But much as you wanted to love a song with the craven rhyming couplet “Teenage dreams in a teenage circus/ Running around like a clown on purpose”, it felt like an awkward assemblage of hooks stuck together with the sort of demented pomp found on old Todd Rundgren records. Thankfully, he finds his stride with Blame It on the Girls, a double-yolker chorus with verses that take their melodic cues from the showtune- scented pop of early Harry Nilsson.

 

This time round, he avoided the mawkish power-balladeering that blighted sections of 2007’s Life in Cartoon Motion, but on an album whose apparent creative wellspring is the singer’s tricky adolescence, the let’s-do-the-show- right-here! chutzpah of Dr John extends some way short of a lyric with more than a hint of How Soon is Now about it. Coming from an artist who remains reticent to divulge his sexual orientation, the words of Toy Boy are bound to come under scrutiny. Here, the singer casts himself as a toy whose feelings for another plaything are cast aside in favour of a “Barbie girl”. Sadly, the plinky-plonky music-box arrangement presents a credulity- stretching challenge even for those who made it through the whole DVD of Rufus Wainwright’s re-creation of Judy Garland’s tribute concert.

 

Fascinating as they are, his failures are still failures. Thankfully, there aren’t many of them on The Boy Who Knew Too Much. Once We Are Golden has finished its chart journey, there are a few more representative emissaries waiting to supplant it. Over spare percussion and plaintive highlife guitars, Blue Eyes leaves as its calling card the sense of déjà vu that comes with all great pop. Best of all though, is Rain, one of several moments on here that suggests that, even if people eventually grow tired of the jazz hands, he’ll be firing hits into the ether for as long as he cares to do so. Ker-ching indeed.

[silver]

Already posted I think

[FREDDIESDOUBLE]

Silver is right , been posted 4 times

 

Where is it hmmmm <looks>

[mari62]

Already posted I think

 

Silver is right , been posted 4 times

 

Where is it hmmmm <looks>

think there are just 3 about this one

http://www.mikafanclub.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19790

http://www.mikafanclub.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19792