M.I.A.

Kala

Interscope

originally published August 22, 2007

Since breaking out as a blogosphere superstar in 2004, M.I.A.'s story has received as much notice as her music. (The short version: Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers, London, Public Enemy, St. Martins College, Elastica, Roland MC-505, Diplo, "like PLO, we don't surrendo.") In the months leading up to the release of Kala, the erstwhile Maya Arulpragasam's second album, the story has acquired a few new chapters: She recorded it in India and Trinidad and Africa and Australia! She broke up with deejay/ producer/ boyfriend Diplo! She couldn't get an American visa for eight months! She worked with Timbaland and Three 6 Mafia but many tracks didn't make the album (though Timbo's "Come Around" shows up as the final track)! The behind-the-scenes stuff always threatens to overshadow M.I.A.'s music, but her debut Arular avoided that fate by being head-spinningly undeniable. On Kala, however, M.I.A. embraces her own notoriety and adds it to the pan-global stew of her music; this is Maya's World Tour, a victory lap that sounds like a struggle.

For all that Arular sounded alien and brand-new, it still fit comfortably into established dance music and hip-hop parameters; the clanging, abrasive "Galang" was still accessible enough for a Honda commercial. It's hard to imagine Kala's "Bird Flu" occupying a similar role on the airwaves. "Galang" and its brothers and sisters were apocalyptic noise blasts, but they presented an apocalypse that we understood - a fun pop apocalypse where you still get to wear awesome clothes and dance all night as the world burns. Kala is the morning after: the world burned down and all our clothes are covered in soot, but shit, we're still alive. It's the Children of Men of Bollywood-dancehall-baile funk-hip-hop-New-Wave albums. The beats are more complex than the single-minded bangers and grinders of Arular, all dense polyrhythms built out of regional percussion recorded on that world tour, slabs of synth noise, Bollywood strings, snatches of street noise and snippets of recognizable songs ("20 Dollar" finds M.I.A. singing the chorus of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" in an even more otherworldly voice than Black Francis' over the chord progression of New Order's "Blue Monday," reduced to a sinister buzzing bass throb). It's music for megacities, the soundtrack to the alternately grim and thrilling urban future to which we're all doomed.

Like Children of Men or Arular, Kala is a political work because it's made to seem political through the accrual of loaded words and images. In terms of a coherent political POV, there's not much more than the chorus of "Hussel:" "Hustle, hustle, hustle / Grind, grind, grind / Why has everyone got hustle on their mind?" And M.I.A.'s tales of thug life are, uh, less than convincing: one particular verse in "Paper Planes" ("No one on the corner has swag like us / Hit me on my burner, prepaid wireless / We pack and deliver like UPS trucks") sounds like the Cliff's Notes version of an episode of "The Wire." But questions of authenticity have dogged M.I.A. for three years now, and she's clearly moved past it. It helps that "Paper Planes" is spectacular, a mid-tempo Frankenstein jam made from a sample of The Clash's "Straight to Hell," the chorus of Wreckx-N-Effect's "Rump Shaker" and gunshot SFX. It also helps that a coherent political point of view isn't what we should be looking for from pop music anyway. I'll take M.I.A.'s third-world travelogue dispatches over Conor Oberst whining about Bush any day of the week.

And the real political power of Kala is in the music: the intermingling of rhythms from different cultures (I know that sounds like the kind of "world fusion" shit you'd hear on the Muzak at Pier One, but trust me, M.I.A. gets her 25 Indian temple drummers to go wild), the infectious voices of children (again, that sounds terrible on paper, but check out "Mango Pickle Down River" with the Wilcannia Mob, a group of 10-year-old Aboriginal rappers with limited flow but amazing raspy, croaking voices that half the emcees in America would kill for), and sounds that hold personal meaning. The love-in-the-time-of-genocide single "Jimmy" is a reworked version of the 1982 Bollywood soundtrack hit "Jimmy Jimmy Aja," a song that the young Maya Arulpragasam used to dance to at parties in Sri Lanka to make a few extra dollars for her and her mother, whose name is Kala. So maybe "hustle, hustle, hustle" is a pretty coherent political POV after all.

Gardner Linn

Angwish

Calamity

Keh

originally published August 22, 2007

Charlotte, NC band Angwish resides at the crossroads of multiple personality and no personality. Although the band has been releasing records since 1999, Calamity sounds like a new band's demo tape. The mix of styles is irritating to the point of making the listener feel sorry for the band. It’s unfathomable, too, that at no time during the process of making this album did someone stop them and tell them it wasn’t a good idea. Angwish isn’t at all pretentious, which makes Calamity much harder to deal with. It’s easy to dismiss the faceless alt-rock douche bags aping Coldplay or some such shit, but much more difficult to assail music that seems sincere.

Essentially, this album is the sound of a band that fell asleep in 1992 after recording a record then woke up in 2007 and released it. It’s like Rip van Rock Band! In the early '90s, there were lots of records released by local and regional bands that sounded exactly like this: straight-up sub-Nirvana metal-grunge, goofy pop-punk, poorly rendered love songs, flange-laden Sabbath-styled psychedelia and other junk.

There are a couple of songs, though, that are somewhat decent. “Destiny” is a solid, So-Cal, four-chord punk romp and catchy as hell. Additionally, both the vocal melody and guitar solos on “Euro-Pop Ascended” are sweetly delivered with an honest sense of urgency.

The most unfortunate thing about Calamity is that it’s not an album, really. It’s a jumble sale. Angwish deals in old goods that, unfortunately, will never be precious antiques; they'll remain merely junk.

Gordon Lamb

Angwish is playing at Tasty World on Monday, Aug. 27.

The New Pornographers

Challengers

Matador

originally published August 22, 2007

The New Pornographers started off as a fun, balls-to-the-funwall power-pop group, and it has been slowly backing away from that ever since. It worked at first, but most of the last release seemed far too lifeless for so animated a band.

On Challengers, though, the new sound works, with acoustic guitars and quieter drumming showcasing songs crafted for comfort rather than energy. There’s no better example of it than the title track, where Carl Newman and Neko Case sing a Fleetwood Mac duet, and “Adventures in Solitude” shouldn’t be ignored with its piano and strings and gorgeous dual vocal from Case’s excellent full-time replacement, Kathryn Calder.

The real standout songs, though, are Dan Bejar’s, whose contributions keep getting better and better; if it weren’t for “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” he’d have had the best song on 2005's Twin Cinema, too. He and Newman seem to have switched roles as songwriters, so much so that “The Spirit of Giving” could pass for a Mass Romantic outtake. (Albeit with flutes.) Maybe it’s because his tracks have a pulse that Newman’s tracks consciously avoid, or maybe it’s because Newman’s writing direct lyrics rather than evocative, allusive ones while Bejar’s vocals are constantly surprising, but in the end, it’s probably just that “Myriad Harbor” is one of the best songs of the year. In their wonderful way, the New Pornographers are still trying to have it both ways, and Challengers is an album in the old sense: a rewarding, cohesive collection of music, with a few great free-standing singles to spice things up.

Michael Barthel

The New Pornographers are playing at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta on Tuesday, Oct. 30.