M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\

M.I.A. Where to begin… Whether she is waging a one-woman war on New York Times journalist Lynn Hirschberg for having the audacity to criticise her, or making daft pronouncements about the CIA being the mastermind behind Google and Facebook, M.I.A. has been getting attention of late for all the wrong reasons.

Despite this, behind all her agitprop sloganeering Maya Arulpragasam has always been a good artist. There was far more to 2007’s “Kala” than the now ubiquitous Paper Planes, with excellent cuts such as Boyz, Jimmy and Hussel proving that she could create great music across a number of genres. When M.I.A. was creating albums this good, it was easy to forgive her the occasional ill-informed political comment, especially as her heart usually seemed to be in the right place.

Yet it is getting harder and harder to defend M.I.A. against her many detractors, and with the arrival of “Maya” I have to ask myself the question, “Is this really worth defending?” Indeed, after listening to this record I had to go back to “Kala” and remind myself that once M.I.A. did in fact have the tunes to match the ego.

Things get off to an inauspicious start with The Message, and it’s nursery rhyme chant of “hand-bone connects you to the internet connects you to the google connects you to the government”. There are certainly questions to be asked about who is watching us online, and information politics is clearly an important issue, but quite frankly M.I.A. sounds less like a soothsayer of the digital age and more like a paranoid nutjob. 

Next song Steppin Up opens with the sound of electric drills, and this cacophony is actually one of the more melodic moments on an album which seems deliberately, and unneccesarily abrasive. These songs were obviously conceived as being challenging to the listener; instead they just sound ugly. “Maya” quickly blends into a single horrible mass, the gaps between each aural onslaught barely distinguishable, and it is almost impossible to single out any track as any less or more awful than the rest. Nevertheless, Teqkilla deserves special mention for being, at over six minutes long, about twice as much awful as the other tracks here. It’s really fucking awful.

Divorced from its shock-and-awe video Born Free can only be seen as an aimless mess, and it is far from being the worst thing here. The chorus of first single proper XXXO sees M.I.A. trying to sing properly for the first time, and you’ll soon wish she hadn’t gone to the bother. There is the occasional glimmer of hope, such as It Takes A Muscle, but it is telling that the best song on this record is a cover.

I cannot stress this enough; M.I.A. can make good songs and can, as shown by “Kala”, make a consistent album. Here she has only managed the latter, and far from being consistently good, Maya is the most consistently uninspired, discordant and just downright upsetting record I have heard in a long time.

2/10

Hopefully that will please my CIA superiors.

Jed. x