The sound here is chiefly amped-up bhangra. On top of a potpourri of blips, beeps and dancehall hip-hop beats, the rapper is a sexy presence, sounding almost exactly like Annabella from 1980s new wavers Bow Wow Wow, delivering perfectly synchronized staccato rhymes.
Aside from some useful moments (the tracks Boyz, World Town and the great opener Bamboo Banga), the pounding, over-the-top electronics grow tiresome, and you wish M.I.A. would take a breather and go in for some musical RnR.
The French-Spanish pop star Manu Chao works hard to keep things as simple as possible.
La Radiolina, his first studio album in six years, continues a line of discourse he's been at since 1998, and though the ruckus isn't as interesting as it was on his last record, Proxima Estacion Esperanza, it's pretty similar: one short track flows into another, often echoing something from a few songs back, and the record coheres through recurring samples of police sirens, harmonica blowing and flickering guitar lines. This is the logic of dub-reggae, in which one's own work is recycled into infinite versions.
If the phrase infinita tristeza, which cycles through the new song Tristeza Maleza, sounds familiar, that's because it was the key phrase in a song called Infinita Tristeza from the last album. And if, along the course of the new record, El Hoyo sounds to you like Mama Cuchara, which sounds like the album's single, Rainin' in Paradize, you're not wrong. It's the same three-chord, minor-key progression.
No doubt his basic concept is powerful: a folk-punk-rumba-flamenco pidgin, with shorthand agitprop lyrics made of small, urgent phrases, sung in his thin, nasal, rancor-free voice. But the disappointment of La Radiolina is that Manu Chao's music isn't as arrestingly odd as it used to be.
- Agencies
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