There are a lot of children involved in UK chart-topper Mika's debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion. His flashy video for the British No. 1 "Grace Kelly" features a young girl in a gauzy yellow dress atop a piano, mouthing the words of a certain captivating Hollywood princess. The implication-- although nothing on this album is so much implied as flamboyantly howled-- is that this pint-sized Grace is a cute stand-in for a heartbreaker his own age. In "Lollipop", a chorus of children scream emotive truisms about how "love always gets you down." And in "Any Other World", a group of churchy teens cry themselves to sleep singing, "Say goodbye/ To the world you thought you lived in." The whole album reeks of wide-eyed youth, Mika appearing not so much an inquisitive elder as a peer, comfortable among his backup vocalists, advice-givers, and child actors. It's in this cushy setting that Mika wastes classical training to borrow respectful (Freddie Mercury) and cheap (Robbie Williams) pop tricks that depreciate exponentially in his hands.
There's virtually zero worth to this album, a combination of zealous experiments with Garage Band and would-be Music and Lyrics soundtrack cuts, but to a regenerative surplus of hypnotized young souls, this is brilliant stuff. It's as if Mika and his over-production team knew-- despite the lack of confidence that torments the album-- that songs like coming-out party and high school musical tribute "Billy Brown" were just what a million people bedazzled by staid British pop music would pay money for. Turn the dial just a few degrees in either direction of the Scissor Sisters-- the UK's most successful act of 2005-- and you get the odious "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)", a pumping, chorus-infested jam session complete with gospel backup singers that tragically feels the need to reassure "big girls" they can be beautiful.
"Erase", in another life, might find itself on an "American Idol" winner's album as one of the filler tracks, and here the hybrid of lugubrious, wispy piano verse and Avril Lavigne-lite chorus is a fitting U.S. bonus track. "Any Other World" starts with a foolhardy piano line, but soon transcends to more breathless melodrama about relinquishing innocence for experience or something. There's a hollow quality to much of the music and its lyrical content, insulting our intelligence and slandering Fiona Apple's dozy adage that pop's subjects must be "broad enough that everyone can relate to them." In effect, the only perfectly not broad moment on this album is the only one of merit: An aging female relative, I assume, sharing the anecdote of being jilted by a man who ran off and married someone else.
For his part, Mika seems as if he's banking on the belief that listeners too lazy to replay their 90s favorites will hold a lighter to anyone who can resuscitate a formula, regardless of how dead it looks. Taking basic AAA chord progressions, dramatic string sections, backup vocalists, and his own virtuosic but easily satisfied voice, he creates a world of relatable montages. The album mildly undulates in tempo and mood, but is altogether uniform in its money-hungry quest to transport music lovers to a horrific place where pop songs double as cruise-ship entertainment.
