We all remember Grace Kelly, that annoyingly hummable three minutes of camp pop perfection that saw the unfailingly irritating Mika prance to fame in 2007. Few remember the rest of the Lebanese oddball’s first album, Life in Cartoon Motion, largely because it was rubbish, a jamboree of self-indulgent pop offal. Still, perhaps just off the back of the success of that one song, some industry bod has seen fit to award the bloke another album. Big Mistake.
Mika’s latest offering, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, achieves what few thought possible by out-camping its predecessor. The listener is left exhausted after just three songs, worn down by the ceaseless torrent of tinny nonsensical pop delivered in Mika’s thankfully inimitable screeching falsetto. By song six (if still listening), they are comatose, their eardrums burnt out by the bombardment. And yet on Mika wallows, with each song gamely proving the theory that no album is too bad for release. Why, oh why, couldn’t the floppy-haired Frodo Baggins impersonator have stuck to his natural role as an Any Dream Will Do contestant?
Whoever saw fit to sanction the album’s release obviously thinks its success rests on its first single We are Golden replicating the success of Grace Kelly. But lightning, no matter how much glitter you put on it, doesn’t strike twice and the fact it is the standout track says little for the rest of the album. And that’s even without the sheer, surely unforgivable weirdness of the video for the song, in which Mika dances around a bedroom on all fours dressed just in underpants and golden boots. It really is grotesque.
How Mika got ahead in the music industry, let alone made it to a second album, is unfathomable, but one thing is for sure: in the pantheon of musical crimes, this album rates pretty highly. In The Boy Who Knew Too Much, Mr. Flounce 2009 has produced a true clusterfuck of an album that should surely, surely ensure he doesn’t get the chance to make a third one. The only reason I can think for buying this album for someone is that you want to annoy them. But unless you want to lose that person forever, I wouldn’t risk it.