Album Review : M.I.A. - Maya
- Written by Russell Warfield
What a difference a slew of media spats and a couple of crossover hits can make. On her last album’s opening track, M.I.A. announced that she was “coming back with power, power”. Fast forward a few years and, as her new album Maya moves through its opening tracks, she’d be pissed off to be described as “coming back”. M.I.A. is resolutely still here. “You know who I am... I run this club” she tells us with the effortless swagger and total conviction of a woman who knows (and knows that we know) that she’s spent the last few years dominating the world. Having earned the licence to make whatever the hell record she wants, M.I.A. exploits this opportunity on Maya.
Kala sounded like the product of the positive aspects of globalisation; taking its flavours from numerous countries of the real world. Maya, on the other hand, sounds like it was formed within the grimiest bowels of the internet. Already a lot has been made of Maya being an album which will alienate a lot of M.I.A.’s casual fans and indeed this is true to a point: this album is seriously noisy and often bewildering. The album’s first proper track heavily samples an electric drill (to great effect, by the way); a mere three tracks in she drops a six and a half minute noise collage; her only two singing efforts are buried as the final two songs of the album. It sometimes feels like Maya is the world’s most perfect union of album artwork and music when it sounds like M.I.A. has deliberately obscured and mutilated her own record. Vocals are often smothered deep in the mix whilst beats shift, stutter and slide from underneath you at the drop of a hat.
But just because songs like ‘Born Free’ and ‘Meds and Feds’ (the latter brilliantly centre-staging a punishing guitar riff from the new Sleigh Bells record) take M.I.A. to a far heavier and more alternative place than she’s ever been before doesn’t mean she hasn’t got another hit in her. Lead single 'XXXO' is begging to be dropped at the clubs and the barbecues in equal measure – easily her biggest ever pop number sporting her strongest ever hook. Overall, however, Maya flourishes the most when it distances itself furthest from Kala and Arular. Songs like ‘Story To Be Told’ and ‘It Iz What It Iz’ are barely distinguishable from the tracks you skipped on the last record – M.I.A. by numbers, lacking both vitality and conviction. What makes this record exciting is the new stuff: the filthy noise of songs like ‘Steppin Up’ and the laid back effortlessness of ‘Luvalot’, for example.
Sometimes it might feel like M.I.A. is being contrary for the sake of it but a lot of the alienating decisions she makes during the course of this album pay off through the sheer audacity of the gamble. Thankfully, the album often transcends admirable audacity and the music works on its own terms in exciting and engaging ways. Whether or not Maya lands with you probably depends on whether you judge M.I.A. to have truly made the record she genuinely wanted to make or if you judge her to be laboriously Defying Expectations; whether you judge her to be making an essential, exciting record or an Important, Provocative Album (a good preliminary test for this would be to consider whether you think the ‘Born Free’ video was fairly intelligent and slightly tongue-in-cheek fun or an effort to Make A Point). By and large, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. M.I.A. may not always display a huge depth of self-awareness but she’s always self-assured and, when it comes to making a record like Maya, that’s the far more essential attribute.