Kala
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Free Music Notes for Kala
Free Music Review: Out of This World
Hit: 4 Stars
I love M.I.A. She experiments with music like a scientist does with lab rats. Crazy beats, untouchable energy I love it. Free Music Review: Kala
Hit: 5 Stars
To understand what makes Kala succeed so brilliantly is to realize why so many anti-war albums fail. Exhorting a message is easy. Getting people to sit up and pay attention is a much more formidable task, one that's proven too tall an order for the likes of the Flaming Lips, Nine Inch Nails, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, From Monument to Masses, and dozens of others. Kala sets itself apart by pulling off the neat hat trick of sounding both urgent and joyous--something that the Sri Lankan M.I.A. (n?e Maya Arulpragasam) managed to do with 2005's Arular, but which gets presented here to an incredible new extent. Perhaps Arulpragasam became a musician to push a point, but Kala is better poised for a club than for brow-furrowing headphone listening or a street protest; it is music first, a message second.
Surely, Kala is some of the most exciting world-electronica fusion the United States has heard since, well, Arular. The production on "Bird Flu" is so chillingly perfect that you might forget that the song has no melody to speak of. Here and elsewhere, M.I.A. exploits the universal and pleasurable properties of percussion to draw us into Kala's world; unless you actually live there, your knowledge of Sri Lankan music is probably nil, and M.I.A. is the most accessible guide one could hope for. Tribal drumming and modern-day electro exist alongside each other as naturally as oil and vinegar, while M.I.A. plays to and uproots our expectations by taking world music clich?s and turning them on their heads, whether it's the hilarious pygmy-like shouts in the war-paint-covered "Bird Flu" or the ersatz strings in the 1982 Bollywood cover, "Jimmy". If anything, Kala hammers home Sri Lanka's status as a hotbed of multiculturalism. Its music is African, Indian, Middle Eastern, British and wryly American all at once, and I can imagine no better environment for an anti-war cry than one in which musical styles coexist this peacefully.
M.I.A.'s exhortation strategy is fresh, uncommon, and sledgehammer-blunt. "Fight on!", the album cover shamelessly reads, and it's clear that M.I.A. considers a move toward peace as literally that: a mobilization that requires as much force as soldiers are willing to devote to a war. Her fight-fire-with-fire approach results in music that's more bracing and confrontational than Arular while still avoiding sounding militaristic, instead coming off like a cheerleading squad that means deathly serious business. M.I.A.'s voice often feels like a drum, pounding away about the price of AK-47s in Africa, forgoing a fashion career for the sake of protest, being hassled about immigration papers and what it might be like to blow up the fighters in her dreams. She stands above the dreck as a paragon of self-confidence, while even allowing some humor to peek through on "Boyz": "How many no money boyz are crazy, how many boyz are raw? / How many no money boyz are rowdy, how many start a war?" (The `z's aren't there for nothing.) Of course, when Nigerian M.C. Afrikan Boy reproachfully spits, "You think it's tough now? Come to Africa" on "Hussel," we don't dare laugh.
Perhaps most phenomenal is how M.I.A. made a better album than Arular by grabbing the reins herself. For Kala, she aligned herself with UK house producer Switch, whose relatively hands-off approach allowed M.I.A. to have a greater say in the production and arrangements than she had on Arular (heretofore considered DJ Diplo's album above all). It shows; Kala sounds like the album M.I.A. wanted to make, all the way down to the slinky swamp song "The Turn." In fact, "Come Around" is the only track I can think of in which Timbaland's foray behind the boards actually makes the song less interesting than what surrounds it. If M.I.A. wasn't an international superstar before Kala's release, she likely will be and certainly deserves to be; this is her album, reflective of her vital personality and compelling statement of purpose at every single turn. In an era riddled with ghostwriting, lip-synching, showboating and O-Town, few recording artists alive are less deserving of M.I.A.'s own namesake than M.I.A.
Free Music Review: Weird, Wacky, Inventive - but not a Masterpiece
Hit: 3 Stars
All these glowing reviews for MIA would lead you to believe that this album is "all that". Well, its not. Its certainly groundbreaking in the same way that a TV show throws up a new story arc and you say "Hey, I've never seen THAT done before!", but the similarity ends there.
That said, this album does have its' moments. First of all, one must be in the right frame of mind to appreciate an album such as this. If youre a fan of simple pop or rock music, I wouldn't really advise this - you might actually get a headache (a couple of my friends I thought would really like it, ended up hating it and calling it a "collection of noises"). However, if you like experimental fusion music, Missy Elliot style beats, and a whole lot of synthesizer, then well, you're in luck.
Make no mistake, MIA is no great vocalist. In fact, her voice is the least interesting thing about her. As a rapper, she is average at best - her quaint English stylings lend the songs a certain something but the novelty of that wears off pretty quickly. What she does have, is excellent production, and shes probably invested in a team to specifically dig up old and obscure records to sample.
Prime example is "Jimmy", which was a track on the hit Bollywood film from the early 1980s "Disco Dancer". I downloaded the original track to compare the two versions, and the shocking thing is that MIA hasn't even bothered to tweak the song a little. In fact, the song is a note for note copy of the original, with MIA's vocals overlapping every now and then. Sure, every kid with a laptop these days could make a song like "Jimmy", but you have to hand it to MIA for doing it first.
"Boyz" is a fun number with Sri Lankan girl choruses. That theme and sentiment runs through the whole record. Verses start and stop - choruses that are supposed to appear don't, and musical interludes take a completely different direction on some songs - all in all, this is an unpredictable and fun record, but its best savored in small doses.
MIA is a novelty act, yes, but you can't deny that her songs sound good on hi-fi equipment. She should really thank her producers - they did a remarkable job getting her the best of everything, and this album, "Kala", is a winner because of that. Not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but as a creative experiment, this was quite spectacular.
Three Stars.
Free Music Review: SHE DID IT AGAIN !
Hit: 5 Stars
M.I.A. gave us more world/techno/hip hop beats on her sophmore album and she doesn't dissapoint! I love listening to this while washing dishes it makes me dance. She is so refeshing, I love how shes not confined to one genre of music. Free Music Review: It takes a few listens to properly ingest...
Hit: 5 Stars
... but the time spent taking in this album is well worth it. 'Kala' is extraordinarily complex. It definitely takes a special talent to make something like this.
It helps to know what to expect. I agree with the notion that other Amazon users have put forward that this is a 'noisy mess'.. but that isn't always a bad thing, at least not in music (See: Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray").
M.I.A. has her album spattered with all sorts of weird sound effects... beeps, cars, ect... and you could be fooled to think that the CD was actually skipping sometimes on certain songs. Then you have songs like "Birdflu", which is an all-out attack of exotic drum rhythms. And it's all done with a unique sense of style.
It takes time to truly appreciate. And it's quite impressive.