Doo-Woops and Hooligans

Right. First album review of 2011. Wouldn’t a humdinger be nice? Scratch that – wouldn’t it be be nice if the first human voice I heard this year wasn’t impossibly whiny and made of chalk and blackboards?
OK, so the farcical ‘Grenade’ doesn’t start Doo-Wops & Hooligans off with a bang. But the man who co-wrote the unstoppable ‘Fuck You’ with Cee-Lo Green can’t be all bad, can he?
Between penning bitter anthem ‘Fuck You’, crooning about ‘beautiful girls’ with B.O.B and wanting to be a ‘Billionaire’ with Travie McCoy, Bruno Mars has racked up a whopping 100,000 single sales in Ireland alone, before his first solo release even hit the shelves. He also contributed to most recent Sugababes album Sweet 7, which we’ll try not to hold against him. He is up for seven Grammy’s next month, after all.
As far as I can tell, there’s not a trace of doo wop on Mars’ debut (wouldn’t The Andrews Sisters blush at a line like ‘…ice cream on a sunny day/Gonna eat you before you melt away’?), but there’s still plenty of super-slick pop nuggets to relish. ‘Our First Time’ is a sextacular slow jam of Usher and Boyz II Men brilliance, ‘Runaway Baby’ is pure funk-oriented fun with an infectious chorus, and Michael Jackson soundalike ballad ‘Count On Me’ is as sweet and timeless a love song as you’ll get in the sweaty world of R ‘n’ B these days.
Elsewhere, a smattering of same-y filler makes for far less impressive listening: ‘The Lazy Song’ has a watered-down Calypso beat which comes off more Jack Johnson than Tau Moe (even though Mars himself is of Hawaiian stock) and ‘Marry You’ is built around the chiming of wedding bells (‘nuff said).
More often than not, the tunes fall victim to some rather unambitious lyrics, none more hilarious than “Tomorrow I’ll wake up do some P90X” (some kind of insane home exercise system, Google tells me). And then there’sthis: “Meet a really nice girl, have some really nice sex/And she’s gonna scream out ‘this is great’ (Oh my god, this is great)” – although you could put this down as the inner dialogue of a demented 75 year-old, not a set of lyrics per se.
Laughable pillow talk aside, Doo-Wops & Hooligans is more than just a good-ish pop record. The release of Mars’ debut means that fans of great thumping chart tripe will finally get some really worthwhile pop on their iPods. Blessed with clean melodies, identifiable instruments and pristine vocals, Doo-Wops… is 40 minutes of hope for the AutoTune generation.