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She's certainly eyeing global pop domination. Therein lies Maya's conflict.
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The WireIt all slides down very easily--but there's isn't much of an aftertaste. [Aug 2010, p.66]
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Mostly, though, the album is noisy jumble of competing sounds and ideas, none of which ever develops fully enough to make MAYA into as cohesive a statement as her first two albums.
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There are moments during MAYA when it seems like M.I.A.'s next move might involve walking into a laundromat, filling the dryers with bricks and silverware, pulling the fire alarm, blaring a drop-forge beat from a tinny boombox, and recording the result.
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The new industrial influences and heavily distorted textures work amazingly well at times, but after a few songs you find yourself longing for something resembling a melody.
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MAYA's many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google.
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M.I.A.'s schizophrenic style does not please this time around. The industrial and mechanical soundscape lacks both genuine protest songs or club jams.
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The dizzy dynamism of her earlier work - a global stew of bhangra, baile funk, and hip-hop, politicized and hitched to block-party beats - is largely reduced to inert feedback and industrial noise.
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The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade.
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On the handful of songs on MAYA that find her exploring new musical territory, Maya doesn't fare much better. It often feels like she's casting about, trying to figure out where she fits into the pop landscape.
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Q MagazineWhile Maya certainly shows no diminution of sheer sonic ingenuity, it suffers from a shrinking of the spirit. [Aug 2010, p.112]
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It may be an above-average album, but its aesthetic matches her persona only at its shallowest levels, in the thinness of its ideas and the often-forceful ugliness of its message.
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The problem with Maya is that the clamour around what she says seems to have begun influencing some of the music that she chooses to make.
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UncutWhere MIA escapes the club and returns to the wider world, there's an overwhelming sense of diminishing returns. [Aug 2010, p.89]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 108 out of 120
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Mixed: 7 out of 120
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Negative: 5 out of 120
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Aug 17, 2010This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Nov 24, 2010
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Mar 22, 2015