ALBUM REVIEW: “/\/\ /\ Y /\” by M.I.A.

Artist: M.I.A.
Album: /\/\ /\ Y /\
Label: Interscope
Rating: 4.5/10

Fresh on the heels of a rep-damaging New York Times interview that revealed the, shall we say, less than sincere side of the “militant” rapper (and left her once touted style in the indie press looking more like the emperor’s new clothes), a disturbing video with no point and a YouTube controversy that seemed to beg for relevance somewhere but found none, Sri Lankan Brit pop tart M.I.A.’s  once hotly anticipated album, “/\/\ /\ Y /\” finally dropped this week…. to a less than stellar reception. 

In other words, this baby is getting seriously panned all across the board.

Why, you may ask, is this germane to my own review? 

The answer is…it isn’t necessarily.

However, as a reviewer, part of my job is to peruse what my critiquing brethren have to say about the new releases of the week.  It doesn’t influence me, per se, but it does give me an idea of what the basic consensus is in the field and how far I swing one way or the other on a certain record.  Well, it turns out that on this particular occasion, I pretty much stand firmly with the rest of the pack. 

Let me just say right off the bat, that “Maya” (I really don’t feel like typing out those hieroglyphics every time) is one of the ugliest sounding records I have ever heard, if not THE ugliest.

I truly don’t overstate when I say that the sounds that fill this album are some of the vilest, most hideous noises I’ve ever encountered in my life.  I mean, this gives Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” a run for its money.  Something about the shrill frequency of the relentless onslaught of bleeps and bloops literally made me nauseous (it was particularly gruesome listening with headphones… don’t attempt this at home). 

The excruciatingly unbearable runout on the track “Teqkillas” with its soulless computer belching of whoops and whirls serves as a perfect example of this.

Shaken, after the first listen I tried to pinpoint what exactly it was about the sonic attack I had just experienced that I found most offensive, and then it came to me… the whole thing sounded like the horrible screech of an old dial-up internet connection, from like 1997.  It’s the absolute purest antithesis of the word “organic”.  It was like looking it to the unblinking dead eye of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

And then it all started to make sense to me… I took a look at the ugly cover festooned with pictures of YouTube players and then I noticed that a couple of the song titles made mention of the computer in some way (“Internet Connection” and “Caps Lock”), and most importantly I listened a little more closely to the opener “The Message”. 

It begins with the sound of someone clicking away on their laptop, followed by the first of the awfully abrasive sounds you will encounter, then buried in this muck come the lyrics; “Headbone’s connected neckbone.  Neckbone’s connected to the armbone connected to the handbone.. the handbone’s connected to the internet…”

Ok, so there is an actual thought process behind the miasma of cacophony.   It’s a kind of a concept album about the melding of human being with the silicon chip, and somewhere in that boggy mix is thrown in a little bit of the Government conspiracy anxiety.

The only problem is that the whole “dark paranoia of a man/machine future” theme has been done before, and infinitely better, by Radiohead with their classic “OK Computer”. 

Still… I was ambivalent.  

On the one hand, so much of it sounds just goddawful, but on the other, this obviously was intentional. … And there are a couple of decent numbers, like the lanky “It takes a muscle” and early PIL-esque “Born Free”… and I guess it’s kind of ballsy and confrontational.

But is it TOO confrontational?

I added up the pluses and minuses in my head, or rather the 1s and 0s…

Is this the work of a woman (the wife of a multibillionaire, mind you) who is so deathly afraid to lose her precious cred, that she creates one of the worst sounding, uncommercial records, certainly of the decade, to try and regain some kind of relevance?  

Or is it the emperor’s new clothes again; a rehash of musical tropes that have already been refined by far greater artists than she could ever hope to be?

After a while these two competing thoughts cancelled each other out and I came to the conclusion that I didn’t care either way.