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Free Music Notes for KalaFree Music Review: superlative hooks Hit: 5 StarsOutrageous genius. The catchiest dance album I've heard in five years. This is one of those "something new" moments in music that come along only once in a long while but change everything once they do.
Free Music Review: Slick! Hit: 4 Stars This artist is from Sri Lanka, and she's got a serious groove! Interesting twists with her beats, but nothing complex. Very catchy, but lyrics are real. Good imagery, good flow, uses diverse instruments. Definitive! A good buy!
Free Music Review: M.I.A is the Future Hit: 5 StarsFrom the minute I heard Galang I knew I had touched upon something groundbreaking, fresh, and inspiring. Kala is a sleeker more polished extension of the genius M.I.A displays on Arular.
I get mixed reviews when I share this music with people...people either love it or hate it. I believe the people that hate it so vehemently or don't get it can't easily put it into a category and therefore dismiss it. Some of the ignorance about M.I.A on this board confuses me. Her success can't all be attributed to "great production" as she produced most of her first album in her bedroom!! Also, she is an incredible lyricist and poet who uses repetition, abstract images, and mixes nonsense with meaning quite eloquently. A lot of negative reviews on this board tend to be full of empty criticality - "i don't get it" or "it's repetitive" or "she's not good". A third grader could write something more personally reflective and soulful. Don't hate on M.I.A just because you don't care for her - we should be respecting young people who are willing to cross-genres and break boundaries...it takes a lot of courage!
Free Music Review: 1 hit wonder??? Hit: 3 StarsHi, this cd was ok. I listened to a few songs on a friends copy and thought it was worth purchasing. Plus i love that trendy song thats she has a video for or whatever.
All in all there are 2 songs i really like, 1 that is ok. I dont even remember there names. and the rest is too techno, electronic, repedative for me.
Free Music Review: An intense, body-shaking, mind-bending album. Hit: 4 StarsOver a few years, British musician MIA - aka Mathangi Arulpragasam - has realised far-flung ambitions.
Her 2005 debut album "Arular" proved an electric shock to the system, its ballsy mashup of street styles and pop hooks earning a Mercury nomination in U.K.
Mia's new album "Kala" is named after her mother, but like "Arular" it mixes up musical ideas from around the world and crams them into a club- and radio-friendly collage of tunes.
This CD drives her music in even more intrepid directions
In fact this time, rather than work with British producers such as Steve Mackey of Pulp and the pop guru Richard X, MIA travelled widely to authentically capture the world music that intrigues her.
The result is fantastic.
"Birdflu" features the sound of traditional Indian drummers, whom MIA recorded on a trip to the sub-continent last year.
"Down River" throbs with didgeridoo she recorded at a workshop for aboriginal children in Australia. The tribal pound of "Hussel", meanwhile, was recorded with a Nigerian-born London-based rapper, African Boy.
Whereas "Arular" was dominated by bouncy funk carioca beats, "Kala" feels like a more mixed, cosmopolitan affair.Recorded in India, Australia, Trinidad, Japan, Britain and Baltimore with producers including Switch and Blaqstarr, it sounds like an infectious international travelogue.
Looking at that luminous, vibrant front cover, or the ludicrously colourful video for "Boyz", M.I.A. seems more like a textile artist than anything else.
If the driving force behind her music is a restless, globe-trotting quest for identity, that makes sense - a collage is a beautiful way of drawing disparate pieces together to create a whole that exists as something important in itself.
"Kala" meets the critics head on, taking her dancefloor smash-and-grab sound global.
She twangs the boundaries of taste both lyrically ("Take me on a genocide tour/Take me on a trip to Darfur") and musically. But a knockout's a knockout, however messy the bout.
All in all, Kala is an intense, body-shaking, mind-bending album, far more ambitious than most pop around.
My favourite tracks are "Paper Planes", "20 Dollars" and "Turn".
More Free Music Notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
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