Top Five Songs: No Place in Heaven (MIKA)

I have a lot of love for MIKA’s fourth studio album.  In addition to the catchy melodies, exuberance, and emotional honesty that I expect from him, it’s also the first album he made after coming out, and many of its songs touch on his sexuality in thoughtful ways.  Here are my favorites from the album.

“Talk About You” – The first number on the album starts off the proceedings with a bounce and a bang.  This insanely-catchy earworm is a joyous exultation of love, relishing in the kind of happiness that fills your head and heart and crowds out everything else.  The song wonderfully captures that joy, in melody as well as lyrics.

Best lyric:  “Walk through the city like stupid people do. / A million faces, but all I’m seeing is you.”

“All She Wants” – I really like this song.  In addition to, again, its wonderfully-catchy melody, it tells an interesting story.  The speaker (MIKA?  It’s hard to say exactly how autobiographical a lot of these numbers are) looks at the “arrangement” he’s made to maintain a wife he never wanted, describing the fantasy it allows both his mother and his wife to live out, with him playing a part but not fully being part of it himself.

Best lyric:  “All she wants / Is another little special arrangement, / A peculiar engagement. / Got a trophy wife that’s respectable / To avoid any spectacle.”

“Good Guys” – Lovely number.  It’s a tribute to gay figures of the past, those MIKA has looked up to and drawn strength from.  I like the heroes he name-drops, and I love the use of the Oscar Wilde quote – “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” – for the chorus.

Best lyrics:  “To my heroes that were dressed up in gold, / Only hoping one day I could be so bold.”

“No Place in Heaven” – This song, and the album it represents as a whole, really continues the theme MIKA set up with the title track on The Origin of Love.  But while that song mostly stuck to religious imagery, this song gets in the weeds of MIKA’s religious upbringing, his sexuality, and what he thinks about his relationship with God.  Here, he pleads with the Almighty, wanting to know “if there’s room in Heaven” for him.

Best lyric:  “In between those words we dare not say, / Do You think that You could learn to love me anyway?”

“Promiseland” – More religious ideas and imagery.  This bonus track ponders the effort MIKA’s put into “doing everything right” and still feeling like it’s been deemed not good enough.  The lyrics are excellent, and I adore the driving beat, especially the one that kicks in at the tail-end of the chorus.

Best lyric:  “Don’t occupy my throne - / Give me the crown I own.”

Top Five Songs: The Origin of Love (MIKA)

At first, I had a harder time connecting with MIKA’s third album than I did his first two.  Not as many songs jumped out at me immediately.  On repeated listens, however, this is a very fine album with some excellent songs.  Here are my favorites. 

“Origin of Love” – The title track is an intriguing, romantic song, at once celebratory toward love and pushing back against those who would illegitimize it.  With the strong religious imagery and specific references to religious objection to this love, I tend to view it through an LGBTQ lens.  Not sure if that was the intention, but that’s how it resonates with me.

Best lyric:  “Like everyone that you fear / And everything you hold dear, / Even the book in your pocket. / You are the sun and the light, / You are the freedom I fight. / God will do nothing to stop it. / The origin is you - / You’re the origin of love.”

“Lola” – Such an infectious groove.  I love the lilt of the verses and the beat of the chorus.  The lyrics feel defiant, regretful, and wistful at the same time, and I like the (dubious?) resolution of this man, vowing that he’s “not gonna fall in love this time.”

Best lyric:  “When you find your love’s for real, / You’ll beg and borrow, cheat or steal, / Trying to get the money just to call her.”

“Stardust” – Even though this song is about a relationship that’s ended, it’s still so bright and upbeat.  Not all the time – I love the plaintive vocals in the line about his heart being left “on the floor” – but overall, it’s about someone who misses their love but doesn’t resent them, who thinks about all he would give them if they could be together again.

Best lyric:  “Funny how the time goes rushing by / And all the little things we leave behind. / But even any other thing I do / Is a little bit of me, a little bit of you. / When will I see you again?”

“Overrated” – I like this one a lot.  The verses are gorgeous, and the soaring vocals on the chorus make a simple expression of a universal pain cut to the heart of the idea, the retreats heartbroken people make to deciding love is overrated.  Really, the vocals are stunning throughout, really beautiful.

Best lyric:  “Words get broken - / Cut me open - / Love confound me - / Kill me quickly.”

“Emily” – Technically, I’m not sure if this is the original version of the song or if it’s the English version of the French “Elle Me Dit,” which is on the album’s bonus disk.  Either way, the beat here is fantastic.  Another rather plaintive subject, but it’s performed buoyantly, as a guy tries to get through to the oblivious object of his affections.

Best lyric:  “Emily, live your life in a balloon. / Lock yourself up in your room, / So the world can never reach ya. / Emily, am I speaking Japanese? / Got me falling on my knees, / Got me praying to Saint Peter.”

MIKA: The Boy Who Knew Too Much (2009)

Really, once you take a shine to MIKA, a single album isn’t going to be enough.  Not long after I bought Life in Cartoon Motion, I moved on to his sophomore release.  New album, same story:  delightful earbugs, joyous beats, and playful lyrics.  It’s made frequent appearances in my car’s CD player ever since I got it, and I will admit to some entirely ridiculous, coordination-less dancing in my apartment with the blinds shut.

 

You’ve already heard my rundown on MIKA and what he’s about, so I won’t spend much time rehashing.  As much as I love Life in Cartoon Motion, I have to say, I think The Boy Who Knew Too Much is even stronger.  It’s a more mature album without some of the roughness of MIKA’s previous outing.  While a few numbers on the first album had to grow on me, pretty much every track on this one grabbed me right out of the gate.

 

Things get off to a big, celebratory start with “We Are Golden.”  The opening chorus immediately jumps out of the speaker and grabs your attention, anthemic as it is catchy.  MIKA’s vocals are perhaps at their most audacious here, leaping into falsetto at the drop of a hat and sailing back down just as easily.  The song brims with energy and commotion, and a boisterous children’s choir adds extra enthusiasm to the title line.  Plus, there’s the lyric “Looking for treasure / In the things that you threw – / Like a magpie, / I live for glitter, not you,” which is just fantastic.

 

And we’re off!  There’s the sleekly syncopated “Blame It on the Girls,” the sing-along “Dr. John,” and the cathartic “One Foot Boy.”  As with Life in Cartoon Motion, there are a few slower numbers, most notably “I See You.”  The song tells the story of someone who’s loved from afar, afraid to take a chance and risk breaking the illusion.  Its gentle, wistful melody builds as the song reaches its ultimate conclusion of “I’m standing across from you. / I’ve dreamt alone, now dreams won’t do.”  Another especially interesting piece is “Toy Boy.”  The light, jaunty tune belies the sad story of its lyrics, about a wind-up toy mourning his lost love.  The toy “had a boy once who loved [him],” but his boy’s “mama thought there was something wrong” with it and surmised that he’d “be better with a Barbie girl.”

 

Far and away, though, my favorite song on the album is “Good Gone Girl.”  It’s the cautionary tale of a fresh-faced “good girl” who went to California in searching of the big time and ended up chasing the company of anyone who’d provide for her.  Asking how she could’ve come to this, MIKA encourages her to remember where she came from, and to “dance to the life you wanted / When you were only seventeen / with your good-girl dream.”  By all accounts, it’s an unhappy story, but the music is so ridiculously catchy that I literally have a hard time moving on from it; when I’m listening to the album, I usually repeat this one at least a couple times before I make it to the next track.

 

All in all, the album is just put together splendidly.  There’s no dead weight, it’s full of engaging, danceable tunes, and despite its more polished feel, it maintains the playfulness of MIKA’s debut.  Just a top-notch follow-up; I love it!

MIKA: Life in Cartoon Motion (2007)

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Like many of the things I like liking, I came to MIKA unexpectedly.  I first heard “Grace Kelly,” his best-known single, on a Community fanvid of all things (a humorous little video about the Dean, in fact.)  I got a kick out of the video, and the song itself was a delightful earwig.  Important youtube research naturally followed, and I spent a lovely bit of time enjoying a nice assortment of MIKA music videos.

 

MIKA, I should tell you, is a British/Lebanese singer-songwriter.  From what I can tell, he’s far more famous in Europe than he is in the U.S., but that’s a shame, because he’s tons of fun.  His infectiously upbeat pop-rock, not normally my style, makes me all kinds of happy, and I like his quirky sensibility as an artist – his music videos are creative and colorful, and his CD liners are amusingly illustrated.

 

Life in Cartoon Motion is his debut album.  It’s where “Grace Kelly” hails from, a ridiculously catchy number that playfully explores the nature of fame.  In it, the tongue-in-cheek MIKA begs to be told how to improve his marketability, offering to be wholesome or loathsome, hurtful or purple.  He toys with imitation, from Grace Kelly to Freddie Mercury, and forever asks why we don’t like him.

 

The albums features other bouncy, lighthearted fare, like “Big Girl (You are Beautiful),” MIKA’s answer to “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”  As with so many musicians, relationship woes loom large in his work.  Some maintain the same peppy pop beats (I just love the driving piano line on “Stuck in the Middle,”) while others, like the gorgeous “Happy Ending,” are a bit slower and more thoughtful.  MIKA himself has an engaging singing style that flits in and out of falsetto like a game of keep-away.  Again, it’s not something I’d ordinarily go for, but he just works for me.

 

I like the way that even the sadder songs aren’t entirely devoid of the joy that pulses through MIKA’s work.  “Happy Ending,” with its understated verses and its mournful chorus of “I feel as if I’m wasting, / And I’m wasting everyday,” gains an exuberant gospel choir in the second half.  The introspective “Any Other World” is soft and gentle whenever MIKA is singing, but an almost triumphant string section floods the instrumental segments.

 

The album’s not perfect by any means.  There’s an unfortunate tendency towards repetition in both the music and the lyrics (“Lollipop” is especially thin,) and a few numbers veer a little too close to The Bee Gees for my taste.  Inevitable, I suppose, when you favor falsetto and danceable beats.  Still, I really adore Life in Cartoon Motion, and putting it on is a great way to infuse my day with a little melodic whimsy.