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Sep 14, 2016So, bottom line, you’ve got a few pieces of trash, a couple of sketches whose mileage varies on how well you dig their hooks, and plenty of fantastic stuff that ranks with M.I.A.’s best work, and M.I.A.’s best work is fascinating and damned fun.
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Sep 9, 2016AIM may not be the Next Great M.I.A. album, but it delivers a solid collection of distinctive, crowd-friendly bangers that sound like no one else.
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Sep 12, 2016It’s always best to take what M.I.A. says with a pinch of salt bigger than the NHS would recommend but if AIM really is her last album, it feels like a fitting parting shot.
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Q MagazineSep 2, 2016Wildly collaborative, pan-globalistically luvvy-duvvy and heaps of fun, it just about hangs together as her best outing since 2007's Kala. [Oct 2016, p.102]
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Sep 13, 2016It's not her best album, as there are clearly concessions on display but it doesn't let her anthology down and she is now free of her label.
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Sep 12, 2016If this it to be M.I.A.’s final release, it’s a fittingly confrontational, vibrant and invigorating piece of work.
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Oct 10, 2016If this is her last record then she hasn’t gone out on her finest note, but that’s certainly not to undermine the album. Maya Arulpragasam’s body of work remains an important reminder of the exciting prospects of cultural exchange and the immigrant experience. Taken in that light, AIM is a fitting addition to her oeuvre.
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Sep 13, 2016Even if AIM is more scattered than her finest work, at its best it plays like a scrapbook that pieces together over a decade's worth of sounds and issues.
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Sep 9, 2016For all its merits AIM is a muddled record, and her divisiveness is sometimes counterproductive.
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Sep 8, 2016A world-weary yet ultimately optimistic statement about the power people may not even know they possess.
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Sep 8, 2016A.I.M. may not be concise, but it's focused and purposeful, a loose collection characterized by sticky-hot swagger, political awareness and, most importantly, urgency.
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Sep 12, 2016Traditionally, M.I.A. peaks when she melts her musical influences, but on AIM, there’s this lingering feeling that too many of the songs were left half-baked. As such, the album feels less like a farewell and more like a preview for her next reinvention, a midday snack before the full-course government takedown.
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Sep 28, 2016As ever, there is risk run by too many tracks and fatigue sets in while listening to AIM. The idea of taking any one of M.I.A.'s albums and trimming its excess to 12 of the most colorfully resonant offerings is tantalizing to imagine. The same goes for this one.
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Sep 19, 2016Despite the wealth of glowing beats and rhymes, AIM would have benefitted from some unpredictability. Arulpragasam's sound is distinctive, but because she never establishes any kind of progression of ideas or strategically unites her songs around a theme, the album remains repetitive instead of cohesive.
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Sep 14, 2016Skrillex-produced banger Go Off, Blaqstarr-assisted Bird Song and Visa are solid electro-rap party jams that also reference some of her past hits, while low-key dancehall track Foreign Friend and clubby Fly Pirate are among the handful of cuts that get stuck in filler territory.
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Sep 13, 2016AIM may be not the magnum opus that Mathangi Arulpragasam is capable of, but the music world would be a good deal less colourful and quirky without her in it.
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Sep 13, 2016It’s an unpredictable mix of sharp, artful commentary, wildly creative song making and, despite the album’s title, plenty of aimless, indulgent meandering.
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Sep 12, 2016If this is her last album (as she has intimated), a true original bows out on a more equable note.
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Sep 9, 2016AIM finds M.I.A. content to simply make an album, not craft a definitive statement to punctuate her career.
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Sep 8, 2016Some of the backing tracks have novelty appeal--the cartoonish, kazoo-like loop of “Bird Song”, the Qawwali elisions percolating through the Zayn Malik duet “Freedun”--but the most striking work here is her virtually acappella treatment of “Jump In”, with just a sparse beat beneath her rhythmic vocal repetitions.
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Sep 8, 2016Maya Arulpragasam's radical patter is sounding a bit ho-hum ("Borders: what's up with that?" she wonders on her fifth album). But M.I.A.'s skill as a buoyant beat-rider remains intact (the glassily thumping "Visa" turns border crossing into a party), and there are moments on AIM where the political and personal blur evocatively.
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Sep 6, 2016A bleak and wilfully impenetrable album.
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Sep 2, 2016It sounds as if AIM was made exclusively for MIA’s benefit: one final eruption of inventive and sometimes incoherent ideas.
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Sep 13, 2016While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in AIM, M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues that are volatile and antagonistic. But at this point her music is more potent in theory than execution.
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Sep 19, 2016AIM isn’t nearly as ambitious. It’s just busywork, M.I.A. watching the clock, scanning the news, occupied, but idle.
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Sep 7, 2016Much of the album comes across as lightweight. Too many of the songs sound like sketches, running out of ideas midway through.
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Sep 9, 2016AIM sounds like a field recording made in the middle of a bustling Sri Lankan market: colorful, flavorful, and most of all, noisy. These inescapable Eastern vibes prove to be a blessing, uniting an otherwise fragmented album.
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Sep 15, 2016There are only fleeting glimpses of brilliance on a long-player littered with ideas that never seemed to get past the kernel stage.
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Sep 13, 2016[The] lack of enthusiasm is all too transparent on AIM, and it renders it an absolute failure of a send-off.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 137 out of 167
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Mixed: 16 out of 167
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Negative: 14 out of 167
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Sep 13, 2016
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Sep 14, 2016
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Sep 9, 2016