Mika

This weekend I was watching my current guilty pleasure TV show, Dancelife on MTV. I love it if only for the moment in each episode when a character hits his or her breaking point and Just! Has! To Dance! "all alone" in the studio, from multiple camera angles.

And speaking of guilty pleasures, during one of those moments when they show a brief clip of an actual video, I was surprised to see, for the first time in possibly a decade, something I hadn't heard of before that also didn't sound like anything else on the channel. Someone from Europe named Mika—here's his myspace page. He describes himself like this:

Think Beck via Queen and Elton John and a touch of Rufus W. Would love to blab about Harry Nilsson but I fear no one will know what I'm talking about... but if you do, you'll know what I mean.

And it actually sounds exactly like someone took those groups and stirred them all up.  (Well, I hear approximately zero Beck, but the rest are dead on.) It's campy, pretty gay in a jazz hands kind of way, and really catchy, "Grace Kelly" [mp3] in particular. (Apparently this song is currently the #1 single in the UK right now, for whatever that's worth.) I've been listening to it pretty much nonstop all weekend. 

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I'm curious to hear more; one of the other songs on the myspace page sounds  heavily influenced by the Beatles—or, as my brilliant wife put it, heavily influenced by a band from the 1970s that was heavily influenced by the Beatles—and the other song is too house-y for me. If he leans too much on dance beats for his full length (hitting the US at the end of March), I'll probably pass. But it the rest of his album is really flamboyant power pop, I might love it.

Comments

[Jeremy]

So, I have this two month old who thinks that 3 or 4 in the morning is a pretty good time to be awake a lot of nights. Consequently, I've been watching A LOT of late late night MTV in recent weeks.

Let me say that this Mika video for Grace Kelly is like my saving grace in the middle of the night. It came on the first time, and multiple times since, and made me really excited. I'm glad to hear the there's [potentially] more to it than that one song. I really hope so, b/c I'd love something like this in my life.

[Jeffery in SF]

Show MIKA some LOVE by voting for him on AOL Music. He will be featured if he has the most votes by the end of March - GO VOTE NOW!

Also check out my post here.